I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: dogs make everything better. They are like moms who can kiss any boo-boo and make the pain go away. As a child, I loved the book by Judith Viorst entitled Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It’s about a little boy who experiences a day where everything goes wrong. He wakes up with gum in his hair; he goes shopping with his family for shoes and gets stuck with plain white ones, instead of ones with red or blue stripes; and his lunch bag is missing dessert. Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for me. I won’t go into detail, but it began with a severe headache last night, waking up every two hours, then forgetting to close the bathroom door and put the dog gate up blockading the kitchen before I left for work and went downhill from there. Ordinarily, these last two would be no big deal. In fact, these are recent additions to my routine. Samia and Pilot have developed a counter-surfing fetish. While we’ve had this problem occasionally in the past, it has now become an almost daily occurrence. The advice I received from friends and family seem rather cruel to me, so instead of breaking the habit, I’ve just been trying to eliminate access to temptation. But, I digress.
To summarize, my work day was miserable and I dreaded what destruction I would find when I came home. Would they have eaten the cookies on the counter? Would they have torn apart my pajamas that I left in the bathroom? Would someone have gotten sick on the carpet, leaving me to pick up…you get the picture. Imagine my surprise when I came in the door and both dogs came to greet me. No one hid, no tails were tucked up under bellies, and there was no destruction. Cookies are on the counter. Clothes are intact. There are no “presents” on the floor. I don’t know how they knew I’d had a bad day, but they must have. I was greeted with kisses and toys and wagging tails. I hooked my home printer up to my work laptop and the drivers were there (I couldn’t get them to communicate the last time I tried), so I can work from home tonight, in the company of my dogs, instead of driving back to the office. I am sure this is their handiwork.
Dogs make everything better.
