Hard to Believe

Its hard to believe that its been two weeks since her surgery. Emma gets her stitches out tomorrow. She has not slowed down one little bit except for about an hour, two days after surgery. That's when, one of the times she was flying all over the house and jumping over everything that she finally paused half way through getting off a chair. She just stopped in mid leap. You could almost hear her say "oh, yeah, I had surgery."

Her and Sidney have sort of been getting along. Every evening though she gets a burst of energy and wants to play with him. Her idea of playing is to grab his: ear, cheek, tail or whatever and pull. He of course does not like that, and so it starts.

He barks at her as if to say 'leave me ALONE!' She hears 'oh goody, that was fun. Do it again." and they're off. Up and down the hallway. Hubby is usually in the middle of this somewhere. When he goes down to bed, they follow him because each night they get a 'toothbrush' (piece of Denta-Stix).  They do their tricks: sit, down and rollover and then get to eat their toothbrush.

Sidney is perfectly happy to go to bed too or come upstairs with me and sleep. Emma, on the other hand, has just had, what to her seems like, her '5-hour-boost'! Off she goes, so Hubby starts to play with her. Now Sidney always used to be the one to do this and Hubby tries to keep him involved, but Emma is such a competitor. They each have a toy to chase. Or at least it starts out that way. Emma will fetch her and then while Sidney is on his way back with his toy, she sees him and HAS to have it.

She grabs it and while Sidney would like to play tug of war with the toy, she

MUST HAVE THE TOY!

Now Sid holds on pretty tight but what Emma does is bite the toy close to where he has it and then gradually work her way up until she is close enough to him that the next grab will be his nose. Sidney, being rather fond of his nose, will let go, at which point Emma no longer wants the toy. She doesn't want the toy, but she doesn't want Sidney to have it either.

Sid will grab another toy and same story again. Sid so wants to be in on the playing but she makes it difficult. We have to hold Emma sometimes just so he can get a few rounds of fetch by himself.
He used to like to lay down in the evening with his mouth over his tiger's nose, but Emma will have none of that. Its okay for her to 'kill' her bear, but Sid can't 'kill' the tiger. The vet told me once that the 'killing' the toy was his way of showing that at least he wasn't on the bottom of the totem pole. There was someone, or something below him. Now he just doesn't even bring us a toy when he wants attention.

I know you're not supposed to put your feelings onto the dog, but he does seemed different now. He looks at us sometimes like "I used to be the centre of attention.What did I do?" I make sure to take him out at least every other day by himself in the car. Hubby will keep Emma at home and Sid comes with me to do errands. Doesn't have to be anything spectacular, as long as he has his alone time. He can wander around looking at trees, or grass, or whatever with out something black stuck to the side of his head.