Wednesday, May 6, 2009

We should be on by now

I intended to post regularly about life with Haley but life has taken a back seat....make that living has taken a back seat... to the every day struggle of work and remodeling projects that don't end and the haze I have been in of late.

Haley is great. Never better. I am struggling. Nathan is making Haley's vibrating collar right now. This is a another project that has fallen by the wayside and is finally, finally almost done. Not a shock collar! It's a vibrating collar that we have "fashioned" out of a remote-control car (we found the how-to online). We'll use it to get her attention. The plan was to use it when she was in the yard and we want her to come inside or to make sure she doesn't run too far off at the dog park. HOWEVER, there's a barking problem we need to quell. Badly. So I'm hopeful that it will work for that somehow. please. She can't hear how loud she barks and it's deafening and shocking. Nathan thinks one day she'll bark unexpectedly and he'll have a heart attack. It's that loud!

We have a lot of rituals with Hales that we don't even realize unless other people come over. The way I call her name although she can't hear me must seem crazy to an outsider. The way I direct her with my hands or push her gently in the direction I want her to go, and she gets it. The way we let her "mouth" us to say hello, because that sensory connection must seem so great to her, with no sounds and little sights. The way she plays and we play along. She likes to fetch, but you have to "throw" the sock (for example) so that it brushes her body as it falls to the ground so that she can find it. She plays alone as well which is hilarious because she has such gusto as she tosses the item and then can't find it and searches for it (when it's sometimes right in fron t of her) and then gets so excited to find it and throw it back into oblivion. When we feed her she takes a bite and then has to turn around to make sure you're still there, so we wait. Once she finds you just the one time she'll happily go about eating.

I think of all these rituals because we are hoping to take a vacation soon and I remember watching Rey's dad's dogs years ago and how ridiculous we thought the 2 page "memo" was about how to take care of them. I wonder if anyone would want to care for my easy loving Sammie and challenging Haley and how exactly I would go about telling them all the random ins and outs and quirks in her character.

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