Our Furry Child!!

If anything is preparing us to be parents, this little rascal is! Meet Dekker, our furry child! He is the closest thing that we have to children right now, but man are we being challenged. You say he is cute, right? We agree, he is the cutest! But do you see the way he is cutting his eyes in this picture! Yeah, you see it! That is trouble! Dekker is a two pound terror! Yes, I said two pounds!

We thought that since we plan on having children some time in the future, that we should try our hand at parenting with a dog! We adopted Dekker when he was about nine weeks old! He was a dream puppy! He slept in the same room as us, but never cried. He rarely had accidents in the house and he loved to just be held! Well, all that has changed...just in the last month.

Since he is almost six months old now, we assume that Dekker has reached the terrible twos, in dog years of course. Over the last few nights, he has cried at unreasonable hours, abandoned any potty training progress that he had accomplished, and lost more than one friend by chewing their appendages off and proceeding to pull all of the stuffing out of them! What happened to our sweet little Dekky-doo?

Not only that, he is now attending school! He is by far the smallest student in his obedience class, but he has been a model student...until this week! We practiced all week long at home and he was doing so well, but once we got to "school", Dekker had another agenda! To make things worse, my "personal" doctor (if you catch my drift) was there with his family and was a witness to Dekker's vivid interpretation of my commands! I just know that he is going to advise me not have children the next time that I see him! Can you blame him? My two pound Yorkie, that could be a snack to the other "students" in the class, had me jumping through hoops! Needless to say, Mr. Dekker spent the rest of the night thinking about what he did (or didn't do) in time out!

I guess that the lesson here is not for Dekker, but for us! No matter how much he does to make us angry, no matter how much we clean up after him, and no matter how much sleep we lose, we love him and would not trade him for anything in the world! My guess is that might be the first rule of parenting! We just might make it after all! But I can't say the same for Dekker!