Milly, the liver and white springer spaniel who lives at my house, is nearly two years old, and you’d think she’d outgrown all of her puppyness.
You’d be wrong.
She still has more energy than a room full of kindergartners. I’m not kidding when I tell you it takes a good 15 minutes after I get home for her to relax. She runs up the hall, to the door, around the coffee table and back down the hall.
She jumps on me. She jumps on the bed. She jumps on anyone who happens to be in the house with me.
She literally shakes with excitement when I tell her she has to sit and be still so I can put the leash on her for our daily walks. Sometimes I takes more than one attempt to get it on her.
This isn’t a complaint. I knew what I was getting when I got a second springer spaniel. My first, Glory, was the same way, and she was nearly three before she showed any signed of calming down.
In all honesty, it’s nice having¬ someone who’s excited to see me every afternoon.
On the other hand, she remains the most destructive creature on the face of the earth. Glory wasn’t much of a chewer. Milly, on the other hand, will chew anything she can get in her mouth.
Within just a few days last fall, she has chewed on my tennis shoes, a loafer, a coaster, a page of coupons I got in the mail from Kroger, two different remote controls, my phone charging cable, a baseball cap, the channel-lineup card from my new cable provider, a ballpoint pen and a (full!) bottle of water.
My friends complain I haven’t properly puppy proofed the house. But that’s not true. She’s just gotten more resourceful – and little sneaky. I made a sandwich for lunch last week. I put the plate and a napkin on the coffee table, then walked back to the kitchen to get a drink. I was gone no more than 30 seconds.
When I came back, it looked like it has snowed in my living room. She has pulled the napkin from underneath the plate and shredded it into, roughly, 750,000 tiny little pieces.
A few weeks ago, I did laundry. As I was folding socks, the age-old problem occurred: I was missing a sock. So I looked in the washing machine. Not there. I looked in the dryer. Not there, either. It also wasn’t in the closet where the clothes hamper had been. I gave up looking for it.
An hour later, I found it. Milly was chewing on it under the coffee table.
A few morning ago, I woke up to find the bed covered in tiny, chewed pieces of brown cardboard. It was in so many pieces that I’m not totally sure what it was. But my best guess is that she pulled an empty toilet paper roll out of the trashcan in the bathroom.
I know longer buy her any of those plush, stuffed toys. It takes her less than 48 hours to de-stuff them.
I’m seriously considering hiring her out to the NSA as a paper shredder. She works cheap and, believe me, she’s more effective than the most expensive shredding machine you can buy. Plus, she’d have the benefit of serving her country.
If nothing else, I just hopes she outgrows the chewing phase before she reduces everything I owe to pile of splinters.
