J'adore Pepé le Pew

Nadine had three sisters, all as black and white as she is. They most likely spent their lives together, near each other in cages, or maybe they got to play together if they were lucky. Who knows. They had eight years together and then nothing. Gone. I am so tempted to call the Anti-Cruelty and ask where the others went. I want a doggie play date with Darcy Jane, Doris, and Myra. In my anthropomorphizing way, I am sure Nadie misses her sisters. I promise this is going somewhere...

My parents live quite set back from the street. Not much light and a fair amount of your typical wildlife for an urban area: deer, possum, raccoon and squirrel. At night, some of these guys like to come out and explore, leaving interesting smells behind. Nadine ignored the intriguing aromas in those early days, but toward the end of her visit, there was finally something she couldn't resist.

Walking down the dark driveway so Nadine could do her business for the last time that night, my mom saw a rustle in the bush. Figuring it was a squirrel, she didn't think much of it until Nadine raced into the bushes. As we know, Nadine didn't like grass and bushes twice her height weren't high on the list either. Yet, something was more powerful than the fear of wet toes. Almost immediately, a skunk bounded out of the bush, leaving his signature scent behind. Nadine followed like a sorority girl to a keg party and walked right into the spray. Giving her yet another nickname of "Dumb Bunny."

"That Little Pot" (another nickname bestowed on Nadie after doing something nonsensical) had been getting a bit rank when she first got to my parents, so my mom had given her a bath. Not two days later, Nadine pooed in her bedroom-bathroom and proceeded to roll in it, requiring a second sudsing. After the Skunk vs. Nadine championship lightweight title fight, Nadine was getting a bath for the third time. No dog was ever cleaner... or more irritated that every time she started to smell good again, these crazy humans would stink her up with shampoo.

So when Nadine found the skunk, could she have been seeing Myra, or Doris, or Miss Darcy Jane? Hoping for a playdate with her besties? Who knows what happened in that little head of hers, but I hope she wasn't too disappointed.

Strike that, reverse it

My flight had been delayed by 24 hours to Madrid due to a strike. Interesting that I am writing this just after Wisconsin republicans are trying to strip certain unions of their rights. I read an article today that blames unions for the Great Recession. Huh? Since no one is sending their 6-year-olds to work in factories anymore (thanks unionizers!), I guess there is suddenly no merit to unions? I'll admit, I occasionally agree when I see a crossing guard causing a traffic jam with her sloppy arm waves and misunderstanding of how people will do anything to make the light, including running down pedestrians like me in the crosswalk.

Then I think of the 20% of the US population who have 85% of the money and I'm much more upset about that than the poor crossing guard who is maybe just distracted because she isn't sure how to pay for food AND daycare for her family that week after her husband just up and left her a month ago and she hasn't heard from him since and...well, suddenly I need to have a drink.

Which is, of course, part of the problem. Us bottom 80% drink to forget the fact that we are broke which gives us a hangover so we call in sick to work the next day and no one promotes someone who is unreliable and hungover all the time and so we drink more booze because we didn't get the promotion and...well, you see where this is going.

But I digress.

Ok, so. I flew to Spain on a Wednesday afternoon, post-strike, and landed the next morning to a city covered with red and white pro-strike stickers. European unions know how to be seen and heard. Nearly the entire country shut down during the strike. What started as a transportation union strike, evolved into either a strike or a "strike-in-solidarity" by most other unions. Based on the stickers, the strike at the very least provided temporary jobs for the people who were diligently scraping the gluey paper off windows, bus stops, garbage cans, signs, sidewalks, statues, trees, homeless sleeping on benches, birds... anything that had been outside for more than 10 minutes the day prior.

My Nadine withdrawal kicked in a few hours after landing as I no longer had hourly calls with mom to see how Nadie was doing. You know, how much she was pooping and eating and being cute. The things Nadine really excels at doing. During those first days, my mom had taught her about going to work. For my mom, this meant walking down stairs to her home office. For Nadine, this meant my mom picking her up and walking down to some other room where it wasn't nearly as easy to sneak away to pee or poo. Hi ho hi ho, off to work they went. Dopey Nadine would plop down nearby and snooze the day away.

Excitement came a few days later when a thunderstorm hit. At my house, Nadine didn't seem to be afraid of the vacuum as so many dogs are. She ignored it when it came through.  We didn't know how she would react to other loud noises, but I hoped she would be as oblivious to them as she was the vacuum.

When the first crack of lightning hit, Nadine was in the office with my mom. She immediately jumped up and walked over to my mom. Nadine is not a cuddler. She wasn't then and still isn't. Unless there is a thunderstorm. She frantically paced by my mom until she was picked up and dropped in her lap. For over an hour Nadine sat while my mom awkwardly tried to type up reports. Until it was raining over Lansing, Nadine wasn't moving a muscle.

I have failed multiple times since then to have Nadine sit in my lap while I read or watch TV. No way, José. She jumps off the same way I do when someone tries to put me on a treadmill. No reason to stay there unless forced to (by gunpoint or thunderstorm). This little lap dog is not interested in fulfilling the destiny for which she was breed. I might have to start playing a thunderstorm CD...

 

I've had a complaint that there aren't enough pictures of Nadine lately. My mom didn't take any pics and I'm a stickler for a timeline so you get two of my favorite pictures from Spain instead. Top is a cemetery in Comillas; bottom is "Puppy" in front of the Bilbao Guggenheim. It's an angel and a puppy dog, which Nadine is both. Close enough.

There's no place like...a 1'x2' plastic box

Sleeping on the kitchen floor would be about as long-term as most of my relationships. Nadine was committed to having my mom sleeping on the floor; not surprisingly, mom was not. A new solution was required. After discussions with a few dog-friendly family members and friends, a plan was hatched. As with most solutions to Nadie issues, another trip to PetSmarCoDepot was the result.

I had been anti-crate for Nadine, assuming (minus any verification) that her prior life in a puppy mill would predispose her to despising a crate or any enclosed space. I had not considered she might LIKE being enclosed because she had spent her entire life that way. Given her behavior with the travel carrier, we had no reason to believe she would accept anything else either. Yet, my mom soon noticed how Nadine gravitated to the blankets tucked away under the side table. Might this mean she wanted to be in a small space with a roof? Albeit one that didn't move when occupied?

The books say that dogs like a den; my friends often crated their pooches and assured me they voluntarily and happily lived in their crates. My immediate concern was that those pups had been crated from a young age...wait, Nadine had been crated from a young age too. Hmmm... might I be anthropomorphizing a bit too much here? Knowing me and animals, the answer was positively "yes."

(I'm the person those ASPCA commercials are designed for. You know the ones: Sarah McLachlan is singing about the arms of angels while images of shivering, one-eyed dogs and teeny, matted kitties flash on the screen. They have mastered the manipulative art of verklempting the viewer.)

While my flight to Madrid was canceled only a few hours before departure due to a one-day strike in Spain and I was frantically trying to rebook our flights and hotel, my mom was hitting up the PetSmarCoDepot for supplies. A crate was #1, with a baby gate pulling an Al Gore and coming in a close second. Unlike Al Gore's previous decade, the baby gate proved useless in the long run. Unlike George Bush's previous decade, the crate made life better for humans and dog.

The first night with the crate, my mom brought it into the bedroom to immediately start training Nadine with it. Since crates are like a dog's den, they will almost never have an accident inside unless they just can't help it. This was reassuring to the (beige) carpet and my parents. With a little coaxing and tasty treats, Nadine went into her crate. The door was closed for a while, then Nadine was let out and got a treat. They did this for a while, then closed the door for the night. The lights went out, and Nadine was out too. Snoring, no less. Like father, like daughter, like dog. She was perfectly fine in her crate...as long as her people were in the room too.

The baby gate was not nearly as successful. Nadine was living the life as my mom had a home office and only needed to leave for brief periods during the day. When my mom did go out, Nadie was kept in the half-bathroom to avoid her untrained bladder from letting loose anywhere and everywhere. Mom was still trying to puppy pad train her as well as bring her outside; the dual training methods were just spam to Nadine's inbox. Without giving her regular access to the outside while simultaneously preventing her from going inside by crating her while alone, she just kept going whenever she felt like it, on her puppy pads and off.

In hindsight it is quite obvious how we should have handled it, but neither my parents nor I had housebroken a dog before. Lesson learned.

The main problem with keeping Nadine in the bathroom was her schizophrenic scratching at the door. Being alone in the house was intolerable and she let my parents know this with claws on hardwood. The gate was viewed as a hopeful solution. Put up the gate in the doorway and she can't scratch. This may have been true, but the Little Houdini had other methods of escape.

A single gal who can't sleep alone

Nadine had very quickly learned that humans were being nice to her. That may have been a new experience, after the puppy mill and shelters, so she was milking it. She would soon follow her people from room to room, just to keep an eye on her pack. She was a momma dog and likely had countless litters of puppies, so she was well-versed in the job she was supposed to do. She was visibly distracted when my mom and dad weren't in the same room with her. For the three weeks she was with my parents, she learned to control them as best as her 10 pounds could. She would pace between the rooms where they were and then walk to the blanket she had co-opted in the sun room, lay down, and wait for them to come sit in the room with her. My mom used that room as her early morning coffee break/crossword puzzle place, so Nadie decided that was where everyone should be, all the time. If you weren't there, she was going to stalk you until you moved.

As I mentioned, during the few days with me, she was settling in and getting over a cold, so she was very lethargic and uninterested in toys, attention, or even food. That was beginning to change after her first week as a pet. At this point, she really wasn't much of what you would describe as a pet. There were no pet-like behaviors. No kisses. No excitement when I came home. No playing. No barking, no whining, no crying. Nothing that told me she was happy. Except... that tail was popping up more often, especially when she heard the word "outside" or "walkies" as my mom relabeled it much to my embarrassment. It was even starting to wag ever-so-slightly.

Although she was not pet-like in the traditional manner, she did need to be by her people. She had quickly replaced her sisters with us humans and wasn't about to lose this family too. Nadine separation anxiety was made uncomfortably clear for my mom on Nadine's first night there. I live in a small, one-bedroom condo; my parents live in a large, two-floor house. Big difference between the two for Nadine, who came from life in a cage.

My mom had made the half-bathroom off the kitchen into Nadine's room. My parents' bedroom is on the other end of the house far out of smelling distance from the bathroom. Just after falling asleep, my mom woke up to a dog yipping. She immediately assumed it was a dog outside, since we had never heard Nadine bark before and had begun to think she simply wasn't a barker. Slowly it hit that, like a bad horror film, the sound was coming from inside the house. She walked toward the bathroom from which a small, squeaky, and slightly raspy bark was emanating. On getting within the smell zone, the barking stopped. Walking away, it started up again. Nothing doing, Nadine needed her people near her. At my house, she was in my bathroom right next to my bedroom with the door open but boxes to contain her so she was able to hear and smell me. Not so at my parents.

In retrospect, it would have been better to let her bark until she stopped and fell asleep, but Nadine is a really tough one to resist. My mom didn't. She slept on the kitchen floor that night, while Nadine was quiet as a mouse.

GRand Adventures: steps and housebreaking

Nadine, or should I say my mom, survived the drive to Michigan with only slight collateral damage to her carrier. Now it was time to settle into the temporary digs. First things first, Nadine had to find a place to do her business inside. In my condo, she primarily enjoyed using the kitchen rug as her private portapotty. That was fine with me since a rug is easily washable and it was kind of, but not really, helping me train her with puppy pads. I would put them down where the rug was in the hopes she would use that instead, which she did a few times. In reality, between my mom and I, Nadine was getting a lot of different signals as to what was expected of her. We were trying everything we knew, which meant changing methods much too often. Poor dog.

At my parents, she choose the carpet in the sun room for her johnny-on-the-spot. A nice beige carpet. My mom, being totally in love with Nadine, brushed off her accidents as one might ignore a mother-in-law's touch of indigestion. To understand the significance of this, it's important to know that my mom is a bit OCD about cleaning. Growing up and to this day, I am constantly losing my half-full water glass because she has put it in the dishwasher when I turned my back. Don't even think about going to the bathroom because the other half of your sandwich will be in the compost before you've flushed.

After getting beds, blankets, secret poop locations, and food in place, my mom decided to take Nadine outside. There are three small steps that lead from the house to the garage/driveway. Mom and Nadie got to the top of the steps and my mom headed down them. She turned to make sure Nadine followed her, but Nadie was still standing at the top, looking at my mom. She leaned over and called Nadine to come - the only thing I had attempted to teach Nadine during our short week together.

"Come on, Nadine!" my mom called again, assuming the pup was just nervous about a new place. Nadine looked at my mom, looked at the steps and...jumped. Jumped off three steps on legs that are three inches tall. She flew off, paws out, and landed face-first on the cement. I never could have imagined that she didn't know steps, but here was the proof. Nadine was so eager to please her new people that rather than stubbornly sit and wait for my mom to carry her, she gave it her all and pancaked the garage floor instead. What a good dog!

And with that, number one on the to-do list became teaching Nadine how to walk up and down steps. Up turned out to be quite simple and she can now manage climbing entire flights of stairs, but Nadine has never managed more then 3 steps down. She doesn't even try. She will stand at the top of the stairs and wait for someone to bring her downstairs. She is such a momma dog and she really doesn't like her pack separated; if one person is downstairs and everyone else is up, she gets a bit agitated.

After a brief check for injury, it was on to outdoor adventures. The parental units have a large yard, but it's mostly wild. My dad had set up a long extension lead so they could tied her up outside and she would be able to run about. Nadine had other plans, not surprisingly.  Almost immediately, Nadie showed her aversion to grass and wouldn't walk on it. Even worse, dew-covered grass in the morning was out of the question. In my research of puppy mill dogs, it is common for dogs to have never walked on grass or felt it between their tootsies, so they can react to it in ways we don't expect. She didn't walk in grass much at my condo as we were always on sidewalks. I was so happy when she pooed outside as opposed to in, I never considered why she was using the sidewalk and not the grass.

Those first weeks in Michigan, Nadie never adjusted to the feel of grass and was more likely to use the driveway (much to my dad's disappointment) or mulch instead. Long streaks of dog pee zebra-ed the driveway until heavy rains, or dad with a hose, washed them away.

Since Nadine didn't like the feel of grass, there was no chance she would enjoy the long lead my dad had created. While part of it was by a cement patio, that meant she was around the corner from the garden where my mom would be weeding and harvesting. After only a few days as the center of attention in our world, she was becoming very attached to her people. Being on that lead and out of sight of my mom was unacceptable. Her separation anxiety would prove a bigger problem at bedtime...

And now for my next magic trick!

Right away I had bought Nadine this fancy-shmacy, preppy-style dog carrier. I had images of me in a Jackie Kennedy suit and pillbox hat with Nadine in her Burberry-type carrier, boarding our first-class train compartment to some glamorous location. In actuality, Amtrak doesn't have many glamorous locations and I can't carry off a pillbox hat, but those aren't the reasons Nadine and I don't travel in her carrier.

I knew Nadine wouldn't be able to ride freely in my mom's car for the three-hour drive. No doubt she would pee and poo all over the place and then spend the remaining 2 hours and 59 minutes rolling around in it. The carrier seemed like a great idea. She didn't mind going into the carrier and I had spent all week training her with it. I could get her in and close it up and she was just fine. Until I lifted it. FREAK OUT!!! I didn't matter how I held the carrier, she would wiggle and shake and scratch at the cozy "sheepskin" lining of the floor like Gilman's yellow wallpaper. I tried putting a hand towel inside, thinking she just didn't like the feel of the sheepskin, but no doing. As always, trying to give her treats to do the whole positive-reinforcement thing didn't work. Food just wasn't a motivator for her. I wasn't sure she knew what "good dog" even meant yet.

One thing she did like was having her belly scratched and would ask for it by doing this:

The "scritch my belly" pose, which I also call "Nadine at Mardi Gras." I should get some beads.

I had run out of time to get her any more adjusted to the carrier. The day had come for mom to drive back and Nadine was going in the carrier one way or the other. I thought she would settle down after a few miles and crossed my fingers wouldn't go too nuts in the meantime. She was fine in it while stable, just not when she was carried in it. I forgot that the car might feel like she was being carried. In any case, I loaded her and her plethora of dog necessities into the car and waved goodbye, hoping she wouldn't forget me after three weeks. I know people always say dogs never forget your smell, but I didn't want her to think she was just going to be shuffled about forever. Poor thing's life had been all over the place lately. She was moving to her fifth home in a month. That can't make much sense to a dog.  "She's just a dog," I kept telling myself. "Quit worrying like an over-protective mother and start thinking about two weeks in Spain!"

My mom called when they arrived home in Michigan. It had not gone as smoothly as I hoped. Almost immediately she starting scratching at the sheepskin. My mom tried to talk to her and calm her down, but scratch, scratch, scratch she went to escape that wallpaper. As they were driving over the bridge on the skyway tollroad, she looked down at the carrier to see two of Nadine's little paws sticking out of it. Little Houdini (there christened her second nickname) had managed to claw a hole in the mesh window of the carrier and was patiently and rather silently worming her way through it. Being on a tollway meant there was no where to pull over, so my mom put her hand over the hole and did her best to prevent Nadine from ripping the mesh even more. I am sure my mom was never so glad that she had an Ipass for the tollways as she was that day. And my Little Houdini was just beginning her magic show with that trick; she had a few other escape routines yet to demonstrate.

Nadine's grandma visits

My mom is my best friend. Maybe not when I was in high school, granted, but even then I can remember only one real fight between us during those trying years - which I believe is a record worthy of Guinness. Daughters hate their mothers from the age of 11 to 17; movies and books say so. But I don't remember ever hating my mom. I don't remember her "ruining my life" as teenage girls are rumored to scream in that awful squeaky voices so many of them own. As a result, she and I have a beautifully strong friendship as adults that I am quite blessed by. I know only a handful of women with such powerful and healthy relationships with their moms. I know how lucky I am lucky to be in that special group.

Now that I've brought my mom to tears that I will pay for with an ultra-sappy card on my birthday, let's get to the point. My mom was the reason I was able to adopt Nadine. She would have talked me out of adopting her, but when she saw Nadie's picture, she didn't even try. She knew that dog needed rescuing and that I was up to the task, even when I was convinced otherwise. When I provided my iron-clad excuse of my upcoming vacation, she offered to drive down to pick Nadine up and take care of her for three weeks. On top of that, she was still willing to take care of her, even after she found out that Nadie wasn't housebroken. In her very clean house with the light-colored carpet. That's a pretty cool mom.

Mom drove down a few days before my vacation to get to know Nadine and learn our routine...what routine there was. We took a few walks and had a photo session:

This was one of the few times Nadine has stayed on my bed without trying to jump off immediately. Probably because she had a cold. Since this picture, she has never wanted to stay on my bed. She can't jump up to it because she's too short. When I lift her up, she always tries to jump off, which is problematic since she needs a parachute to land safely off my Princess and the Pea-sized mattresses. So much for a cuddle-dog!

The highlight of the visit was during one walk from the car to my building. I had never seen Nadine's tail wag. It was always tucked down, not between her legs like she was scared, but just down. I was starting to think that was just what her tail did. She was so shy and timid, maybe she just wasn't the tail-wagging type. During walks, she would follow behind me and never walk out ahead as most dogs do. It wasn't because she was so well-trained that she didn't pull on the lead - she wasn't trained on anything - she was scared and unsure.

As we were coming in, I carried Nadine from the car and put her down on the ground. As we walked, that little tail popped up in the air, the poofball of fur on the end waving in the air. It wasn't quite a wag, but it was most certainly significant! With her tail in the air, Nadine had a bounce in her step that made her look...happy! Flooded with relief that maybe Nadine was improving and settling in, I practically danced to the door with Nadine hopping along behind me.

From that moment on, I have always been able to tell how comfortable she was by the angle of that tail. Her unconscious barometer has helped me relax a bit about how I'm doing as her person. The challenge with pets is that they can't tell us what they are thinking, but Nadine's tail might as well be Helen Keller's hands.

So, Nadine was perking up bit by bit and I was excited to think she might be a very different dog by the time I got back from Spain. I was also nervous that I was changing her world around once again and that might be difficult for her. What actually proved most difficult in the coming weeks were stairs.

The world is your oyster, Nadine...and your toliet

Nadine had spent a fair amount of time outside by now. My neighborhood is a cornucopia of dogs and their smells. I figured there would be accidents inside, but I didn't figure she would just refuse to do her business outside, what with all the signs, or smells at least, pointing to yes. Yet, who knows what the facilities were like at her previous accommodations? Many puppy mill dogs live in cages stacked on top of each other and don't get "walkies" as labeled by my mom. They go in their pens and that's that. She liked to explore the outside, but she didn't understand that she was also to pee in it.

Until she met Emmett. Hooray for Emmett!

I was planning to take Nadine out with another dog in the building named Lucy. I thought maybe Nadie needed to see what other dogs do so she could get the idea. Timing never worked out, but on the way back from the vet, the Nadester and I ran into my friend Melissa and her energetic, enthusiastic and very sweet cattle dog mix, Emmett. I put Nadine down so she could meet Emmett. Sniffs were exchanged, approval granted and we walked on. I thought she might be more interested in Emmett, given her life with three sisters. Not so much. She didn't dislike Emmett, but wasn't jumping for joy at a playmate either.

Nadine is like the girl who's been jilted one too many times - she won't jump into any new relationship before trust has been established. There is a pair of dogs that live across the street that she loves to antagonize and a poodle in the building who is a walking buddy (his owners and I help each other out on occasion when the other has an after-work event), but she's met them many times now. She is a respectable southern gal, after all; any canines who come a-courtin' shouldn't expect any petting until at least the third date.

We walked for maybe a block when Emmett did his thing. Nade gave it a sniff and suddenly started to spin like a whirling dervish. Holding her leash up so the silly thing wouldn't get completely tangled up, I watched as she spun faster and faster for 10 seconds and then dropped off the kids at the park, so to speak. Finally, success! After that day, she started getting better and better about going outside. She still had accidents inside, but she was more often doing her business outside as well.

The vet had warned me that she might never be housebroken. Teaching an older dog this trick was going to be no simple task. On top of it, I live in a condo. I can't just pop open the door every hour or so in the hopes she will go outside rather than in. The second scoop on the training cone was my firm believe in using positive reinforcement in her training, but Nadine wasn't falling for it. After her first outdoor success, I tried to give her a treat. She snubbed it like a tofu dog at a frat party. I found she wouldn't eat outside. How exactly do you train a dog with treats when they won't take the treat?!

Well, lucky for me, I didn't have to worry about it for long... just like when I was a kid and we adopted a dog that I was expected to look after and instead my poor mother ended up caring for, I would toss Nadine's training problems to mom. What a rotten child!