Can't Stress This Enough

Like most families, we have our ups and downs.  Life with a crawling baby boy can be a delight, but also a bit stressful at times because it's just so constant, and if you let your guard down even for a moment, bad things can happen.  Add in life with a puppy, and there's never a dull moment.  But that's all what we signed up for, so we're not complaining.  Just acknowledging the reality of raising two and four legged babes.  I wouldn't trade watching these two grow together for anything.   Yet, to a degree, that's life in our control.  Not everything is in our control, and we had a spike in our stress level recently that just went to prove that.  It started with a death in Greg's side of the family, but that was just the jumping off point.  When it rains it pours, so they say.   And it was flooding in.  These things happen in a life:  there can't be an appreciation of the sunshine if you never experience any rain.

And like all humans, dog owners can lose sight of what is outside the sightline of the crisis they are trying to navigate.  I like to think I can put my Wonder Woman hat on and steer the family, dogs included, through turbulent waters, but things slip through the cracks in reality.  They just do.  I'm not an immortal Amazon woman, after all, I'm a pudgy middle aged person who for sure does not know the Meaning of Life, let alone the Management of It.

Caught in the act

And things happen that, in normal circumstances a) wouldn't happen, but b) if they did, you'd reason through to why and be able to resolve them.  But in this case, I was taken by surprise when my previously angelic Sirius was suddenly misbehaving.  His initial go-to badness was to jump up on the kitchen counters.  As just one example. he ate three pumpkin muffins that were actually packaged, so not only did he get on the counter, but he nuzzled open the package and wolfed down three large muffins in no time flat!  That's not like him.  At all.  Next, he started attacking books.  Well, I've said I've devoured books before, but I meant I read them non-stop.  He was literally devouring them.  Serpico bit the dust first.  Given that I've had it since high school and only read it once, probably not that big of a thing other than it's a shame to think I've lugged it around through all my moves only to have it meet its end half in my recycling bin and half digested, but then he ripped A Perfect Storm to shreds, and I realized I was facing just such a storm in him.  He has been chewing on anything and everything he could find, which is likely due to teething in part, but you could watch and tell it was more frenzied than that.  It has been more akin to someone biting their nails or pulling at their hair.  There is a nervous fidgety energy to his gnawing at the edge of the blanket I keep for him in my bedroom.   It would have been obvious to anyone else, but it took me longer than it should to realize he was just reacting to our stress and not being a juvenile delinquent.

So what does a person like me do in a situation like this?  Well, sadly, the first inclination was wrong:  I'm a mother, so I "mothered" him.  Realizing he was worried over our worry, I was comforting him.  Well, you guessed it, I was also enabling him.  That came to a crashing halt when he pulled out my set of Pittsburgh Post Gazette editions from when the Penguins won this year's cup.  He chewed through the plastic bag and began nibbling on the corner before I turned and saw him.  My heart literally stopped.

Next I did what every one these days does:  I Googled it.  And there were some common themes.  While Sirius is not exhibiting most of the "classic" stress symptoms like panting, sweaty paws, scratching, biting at his fur, etc., he has exhibited a definite regression in training that also gets mentioned:  accidents in the house, and chewing and destructive behavior.

Okay, so it wasn't a leap that he's noticing a sudden spike in tension in the two-legged occupants that he can't figure out and that's why this sudden downslide is happening.

And it's far from rocket science to know who taught him some of these not-so-nice tricks...Geddy...

Now what do we do about them?

Well, there are a lot of articles out there, not all of them created equal, but I liked this one by VetStreet.com because it played into my need to know the why of things.   But there were some common themes:  don't allow the behavior to go uncorrected, but don't overdo it either.  More exercise was suggested, but that's been a tough one - when everything first started, we were all gone for far longer periods of time than they were used to.  The older dogs rolled with it pretty well, but this was new for Sirius.  But hopefully with cooler weather in the forecast, we can remedy that.

But above all, I need to make sure he knows that our worry has nothing to do with our care and love for him.  As I work on that, I find that he helps me feel less anxious and more comforted too. Win-win.  And isn't that the funny thing about dogs?  Just when you think you're helping them...you realize they actually just helped you!