by

My Little Bow Pup

Earlier this week I posted on my Ray-Ray Facebook page that Mama ordered me something really cool from Athena’s store Little Bow Pup.  Much to our surprise we got it in the mail on Wednesday.  How’s that for great service, I ask you?  When Mama saw the envelope she knew exactly what was inside, but she let me open the inside package a little bit.  Until I tried to eat it.
We love the tissue and string!
Inside was a quilted Superhero print bow tie!  Mama loved this print because she said it was fun and quirky just like me. She says the craftmanship is excellent and the bow tie itself is very well made.
I have another bow tie that is a bit more Sirius in nature that I wear when I am feeling debonair, but this one, she said, makes me look like the fun loving clown that usually am. 
Here I am sitting very proud in my bow tie.
 I can’t wait to wear it out and about this weekend.  Mama says that even without a bow tie on she should call me LL Cool Ray because the ladies love me.
Striking a pose.  Is this my good side or my other good side?
If you haven’t ordered your own tie from Little Bow Pup, you should probably get your Mama to do it soon and take advantage of the grand opening sale.  You might be just as handsome as me!
by

Who are You (Who, Who)

While Ray and I were shopping at PetSmart over the weekend, we met several people who saw Ray in varying ways.  I found it interesting how so often people see what they want to see and being the owner of a Pit Bull type dog, I (mostly) love all of the different reactions we encountered.  Here are the various conversations I had in the span of a single visit.

Are you buying him that jacket?
Ray and I were perusing the puffy coat when a guy came up to us and asked what kind of dog Ray is.  “Oh he’s a mix,” I said.  “Well, what is the mix?”  He is American Bulldog, Boxer and a mystery, probably American Pit Bull I told him.  Yeah I think there’s Pit bull based on the shape of his head, the guy said.  “Are you getting him that jacket?”  We talked about wheter or not my husband would disown me or Ray if he were to come home in that jacket and he shared that his dog has a similar jacket which was purchased by his girlfriend.

“Hey, is that a Pit Bull?” 
Yes, he is a Pit Bull Mix.  “I have a Pit Bull, too,” both guys said.
Two younger guys were at the end of an aisle whispering and gesturing in Ray’s general direction.  As we approached, both guys told me that they each had a pit bull and went on to describe their dog to me.  They gave Ray a pet on the head and moved along.

“Is that an American Bulldog?”
Yes, he is an American Bulldog mix.  “We have an American Bulldog mix, too!  We adopted her from an event here last year.”  Then this couple  proceded to show me a picture of the most adorable Chick look a like, lavished some love on Ray and then resumed their shopping.

“Hey Ray, did you eat anyone today?”
This from a guy who was in a class we attended.  He said it good naturedly, gave Ray a head rub and proceeded along with his dachshund.  I’ve decided (too late after the fact) that my standard come-back to that or any question like that will be, “Only if they were made out of peanut butter.”

How does the perception around your dog differ with people and does it vary based on their ownership?

by

Tasty Treats

Like nearly everybody else, I’m fairly picky about what treats to give to Ray.  I mean, he has an extensive treat bar on the counter and so far I’ve not found him to be allergic to anything but with the huge number of incidents from bad treats, I try to be careful about what he eats.  Most recently I tried this recipe that I found  at Doggie Dessert Chefs.

Ingredients
1/2 cup Peanut butter
1 teaspoon Honey
1 cup Tapioca Flour  Brown Rice Flour
1/4 cup Water
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit.
In a large bowl combine all ingredients until well mixed.
Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 inch thick. Cut into shapes with the a small sized cutter of your choice, as the dough tears easily. Place cookies on ungreased cookie sheets and cook for 8-10 minutes.
Cool and refrigerate.

When I realized they probably wouldn’t rise, I went ahead and squished a bunch more on the cookie sheet so I baked the entire recipe at one time.  Of course, I tasted one and found that they are kind of dry but very peanut buttery.  I think the rice flour, which is kind of the consistency of very fine sand makes for a sandy textured cookie treat.  The next time I might try to incorporate apple sauce instead of the water and see what happens.  I will also use a much smaller cookie cutter.  This one was about 4″ long and I feel that with the crumbly-ness (?) of the treat it would be better as a rounder, smaller shape.

The bottom line is that Ray loves them,they’re healthy and easy to make. 

by

Weekend Recap

I had quite a busy weekend.  On Saturday Mama and I cleaned out the pan-tree.  I had to make sure all of my foods went back to the right place and   When Mama and I clean things we take everything out and re-organ-a-zize it all so that it looks pretty and uniform, then we put everything in kittygories and we a-b-c it too.  Mama calls those sub-kittygories.   My job is to make sure all of my foods went back to the right place and that all the kitty food that spilled on the floor got eaten cleaned up.
When Mama was busy cleaning the living room floor, she said I was a funny puppy.  She was on her hands and knees trying to mop under the sofa and I crawled up behind her, through her legs and ended up with my block head poking out of her sweatshirt under Mama’s chin.  What’s so funny about that?  I love being near my mama.  We cleaned the bonus room upstairs, too.  That’s the room that the kitty toys are in.  I like to run up and down the hallway like a little horsey when I go upstairs, but this time we had more organizing to do, so I just sniffed around.  Mama said the best thing was when she was looking around for me and she found me in the living room standing very still, watching the mean old lady Boo Kitty eat her dinner.  I didn’t try to bounce on her play with her at all and I got a treatie for not bum rushing her being such a good little brother.  She is very old and has earned her retirement. 
On Sunday, Daddy and I played squeaky ball a whole bunch so that I would get rid of some energies.   Mama says I have enough energies that I can burn some off and still be the same happy boy that I usually am, so when I had some burned off, Mama and I went bye-bye together.  I had so much fun and met lots of nice people who wanted to pet the Ray-Ray and we talked to lots of other doggies, too.  We were at one of the places that Mommy calls “shopping.”  I like shopping and I wish we could go every day, but we only go on weekends.  When we were at this store, though, Mommy wasn’t looking at new treats, which confused me but she saw a jacket for the Ray-Ray.  When I was little, I wore clothes all the time but ,lately I don’t really like to wear them.  I have a jacket that makes me want to do twirly dance and act funny, so I don’t have to wear that one very much.  This one was different, though. It doesn’t touch my tail and it looks just like Mama’s coat!
I let her put it on me right in the “shopping” store and I kept it on without twirly dancing, so Mama pulled off the tags and took them to the treat person cashier.  He said I look very handsome and Mama gave him her shopping monies and he took a picture of me and my Mommy right in the store.  I wore my new coat all the way home and I was very cozy in it.  When we got out of the car, Daddy saw us and said, “Seriously?”  I think that means he likes it and wishes he had one like ours too.
Mommy said I am her Mini-me. 
After all of my busy stuff over the weekend, I’m ready for a nice looong snore-y nap.  I’m even too sleepy to tell you about the cookies Mama made for me so I’ll let her do that tomorrow.


What fun things did you do this weekend?
by

What a Load of Tripe

Last summer when we had a couple of training sessions with dog trainer extraordinaire, Laurie, we worked mostly on preparing Ray for the addition of a baby in the house but at the end of one of the sessions, she asked if there was anything  else we wanted her  to work on.  Weeeellll, at seven months old, Ray still would not got down the stairs and at his weight it was getting to be more and more of an issue.  I had tried luring him down with treats on each stair, coaxing with a toy, etc., to no avail.  As she went out to her car and dug in the trunk, I wondered what she was going to bring us.  I was sure she was going to teach me some magical technique that I could work on with Ray.  Would we start at the landing and work our way up and down from there? 

She came  back with a can.  A can of some magical, disgusting, vile, green goo that she popped open and waved around above Ray’s nose working  him up to an excited frenzy, she wafted the scent around his snout, gave him a small lick from the can and let him chase her up and down the stairs.  Up. and. down. the. stairs.  Twice.

photo from pet360.com





Green beef tripe is a magical, disgusting (did I mention magical) mess that seems to make Ray do anything you want him to do.  After that session, Ray never hesitated around stairs again.  From what I can tell, though, this horrible can of innards is only available by the case and really?  I don’t want a case of green tripe.  Just having an opened can in the fridge was terrible enough.  Remembering that, however, I decided to look for some tripe in the form of treats.  I figured it was worth a shot to maybe find some tripe in handy treatable morsels to aid in training. 

At my last visit to Mr Chewy, I ordered some Tripe Treats by Petkind which I thought might do the trick.  I was hoping they were small enough to make into training treats and I was excited enough to not read too carefully.

(Photo from Amazon)

These are not small and they are not easily broken, so they are more of a “go to your mat” treat to settle rather than a small tidbit to reward with.  That’s ok, because Ray loves his tripe and a bag of these should last well over a week if given once a day, which I doubt we’ll do.  In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for some smelly, bite-sized tripe, I guess.

Have you ever used tripe?  What kind of results did you achieve?

by

Reason-a-Bull

The behavior that we triple-quadruple-extra reinforce with Ray is “go to your mat.”  We use it to calm him down, deliver treats, kongs and anything else.  We use a variety of mats as well, one of them actually being in his crate.  The crate used to be called night-night, but after the short lived time period when Ray was no longer crated, “night-night” became a not happy word and “mat” replaced it.

We’ve used “go to your mat” so much that if Ray is really interested in scoring whatever tasty tidbit we may be possessing, he will sometimes run to his mat as an offering in exchage for the coveted treat.  Yeah, it’s that good.

As good as he is at offering behaviors, I think we become used to stretching his abilities as I recently heard Asia, the new mama, saying to Ray as she was eating a cookie, “Do you want a bite?  Where might you go if you want a bite?”  I turned to her, astonished, saying  that Ray couldn’t reason like that…just as Ray rushed past me to hop on his mat.

As much as I would like to believe my boy is a genius who can reason, I know it was just one of those times where he offered up the behavior that he thought we wanted, because the next time she tried that line, he jumped up and nearly took the cookie from her hand.  Genius?  Maybe.  Cookie monster?  Absolutely.

*******************************************************************************
We would like to sincerely thank everyone who graciously joined our Gotcha Day Blog Hop.  We loved reading your Gotcha Day story.  Thank you for sharing.
*******************************************************************************

What is your best trick/behavior?

by

Gotcha Day Celebration!

On December 1, 2011 Ray and his siblings, who were to be dubbed “The Sparkle Puppies” were born.  The one’s who survived are all in loving homes and this is Ray’s story. 

I was fortunate enough to be present the night Ray was born.  Not many adopters can say that and I know how special that is.  I helped rescue his little family and I feel a connection to all of them to this day which I’m sure will last a lifetime.  When we finally knew we were going to commit to adopting one of these puppies, what followed was the longest seven weeks of my life.  I got updates and pictures of the litter, but in the early days, I wasn’t completely sure which pup we’d end up adopting. 
True, the moment I laid eyes on Ray, I thought, “I want the green guy.”  He was nearly covered with …something green and icky, but he was the most adorable little piggy.  Kimmel, now known as Chloe, was the only surviving girl of the litter, so if we decided to adopt based on gender, she would have been the choice.  But when it comes right down to it, I think Ray was always our boy.

There were definitely challenges all along the way.  It took a while before Sparkles was nursing the litter but we breathed a sigh of relief when she finally did.  One of the babies above (the smaller black one) was nearly frozen when rescued wouldn’t thrive so we supplemented with food but he didn’t survive the month of December.  Finally when all were settled in, Sparkles began guarding her food from the puppies. 

Because they were on mushy solid food early and by six and a half to seven weeks weren’t nursing, I got the ok to pick up my baby.

The week we were to pick up Ray, I scurried out to do some shopping, after all, everybody knows these little short haired babies would get cold without some coverings.  Let me tell you, by mid to late January, there are some pretty darned good sales on dog clothes and just by guessing sizes, I was able to procure an impressive wardrobe for one so young.  I didn’t, however, bring the clothes with me and I went to pick him up on a very snowy Friday night.  I plowed slowly over the roads in my truck, arriving at his Foster Mama’s home well after dark.  We chatted, signed paperwork and when it was time to carry my naked piggy out into the cold, I whipped my pashmina off and wraped him in it and cuddled my baby on my lap for the drive home.

When we got him home, I will admit that he had a couple of differentoutfits on and maybe I should have let him get a little more settled before making him be my dress up doll.

This one was only worn once before being donated but the one below became his regular outfit until he outgrew it. 


That first evening, Ray was mostly interested in snuggling and that was to set a standard for the next twelve months of his life.  We were pleasantly shocked to find that he slept in his crate as if he owned it and not once whimpered or cried at night.  During the day, if we were together, he was on my lap-in the early days that mostly consisted of me holding a nylabone or some other chew toy and trying to keep him directed there rather than on fingers, toes or anything else that moved and seemed like fair game.  My six pound puppy grew up, right before my eyes and from the comfort of Mama’s lap and 74 pounds later, he can usually still be found there.

This past year has been full of ups and downs, but on reflection, the ups have been great enough to outweigh the downs.  Recently as I bent down to ask for a kiss, I realized I expected a kiss.  I knew I would get a big, sloppy, Pit bull kiss and would not get a lungey over excited shark mouth kiss. 

I’m crazy about this boy, and I have something to declare.  I haven’t said it.  Ever.  Not once in the past year have I said this.  It isn’t anything to be said lightly and it can’t be unsaid. 

Ray is my heart dog.

Next, just click on the “click here to enter” and fill in your info then click on “get the code” to add the blog hop to the bottom of your own post. Thanks!!