31 Days of Lessons Learned: Day Nineteen
If your dog is ripping a tennis ball apart, try harder to get it from him
I was all ready to use today’s lesson post to talk about how good things happen when you’re nice to people. I went out to dinner with my family, then ran a few errands…including getting my daughter’s Halloween costume. She decided that this year, she wanted to be Batman. I couldn’t be more proud.
All in all, it was a great night – until we got home.
Why?
Well, when we got home, we were greeted with lots of dog puke.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Before we went out for our night on the town, I let my dogs out to go to the bathroom one last time. Cooper found a tennis ball that was missing it’s green exterior (the dogs chewed that off weeks ago), and there was a little tear in the rubber. Cooper pierced another part of the rubber and starting chewing on it. The ball started breaking off in chunks, and since he could tell I was about to try to get it from him, he ran into the wet yard. I wasn’t wearing shoes and I was on the phone with the cable company, so I let him win. He came in after he was done chewing the rubber to smithereens. He may have even flashed a “Cooper Rules” smile on his way in too.
As you can imagine, the puke was filled with little chunks of rubber. Unfortunately for me, Cooper got some on himself as well, which meant he also had a bath. While I cleaned up the puke mess, my wife cleaned up the bathroom area and the stairway. All the while, Cooper was running around the house like a puppy…just like he always does after a bath. I was glad to see he was so happy (and to see he was feeling better), but man do I wish I put forth more of an effort to get that tennis ball away from him. Oh well, you live and learn, right?