Getting the Love You Want

You may be oh so curious about how your dog's mind works. Let me enlighten you to my inner dialog:

**Sniff, sniff, I wonder what Mom had for lunch today, oh she was at work, sniff, sniff, maybe I'll go back to the couch for a while and stretch out, sniff, sniff, oh I'm thirsty, oh Ayla was licking my bowl again, what's Ayla doing?, Ayla's not supposed to have slippers, she's really bad, sniff, sniff, she's a girl, sniff, sniff, she's thinking about supper, sniff, sniff, oh yeah, the couch would be good, sniff, sniff, mail man is coming and he's having a bad day, sniff, sniff, wonder when Dad's coming home is that his car door no it's not, ok, sniff, sniff couch**

You get the idea. So you can imagine my surprise when I'm having normal thoughts and I hear, "Hello Orso, I'm here to talk to you if you want to." What the &*^(% is that? At first, I thought I'd gotten too close to being human and was having a breakdown. Instead, as it turns out was a nice woman Mom got to have a conversation between us. It seemed kind of silly when Mom and I have great communication but I guess I was wrong about some stuff and Mom was too. So Mom and I had a conversation through this other lady. It was pretty cool.

The long and short of it is that I now know that they got The Kid to be a friend to me, not because I'm not a good enough dog for them. So I feel a little less anxious and am being a bit cooler about the whole thing. I guess I could have chosen better ways to release my anxiety than using Ayla as a real live Big Red.

So now Ayla and I are playing with toys together and I'm teaching her how to play tug with me. I'm still feeling like I need to be very careful with her, even though she freakin' tries to tug on my flocks relentlessly sometimes.