Busy Month

For some reason April always seems to be my busiest month. I never did get my sisters socks done. Lets be honest, I never even got started on them really and her birthday is Friday. Bear leaves to go pick up Luci Thursday. Hes flying up there Thursday afternoon and driving back Friday and Saturday. He says he will be here before we wake up Saturday morning, but with Luci's legs the way they are some how I doubt that. I expect to see them Saturday afternoon sometime.

I have a lot of stuff to do before Luci gets here and I'm not going to have the time to do it. Ive gotten a lot done, Everything has been cleaned and re-cleaned. I'm still trying to catch up on laundry, have to get the boys room clean, my room clean, the laundry room clean and some how figure out how to clean these nasty carpets without the rug shampooer. Bear and I forgot to get it, I spent too much money on puppy supplies and now I don't really have the money for the shampooer. So somewhere in all of this work I still have to do.... I have to figure out how to take care of everything while hes gone and scrub carpets by hand at the same time. For joy... for joy.

Puppy supplies... Gods what was I thinking. Bear has seemed sad here lately. With buddy gone I thought it would be nice to get him a friend to play with. So we got a mix between a chocolate lab and a Rottweiler puppy. This dog is going to be huge. Its mother alone was built like a house. I didn't get to see its father. But, Chocolate labs aren't exactly small dogs. So now I'm dealing with Bear trying to establish hes the alpha male. Wolf is the biggest of his litter of 12 so hes always felt like the alpha of his siblings. Its not exactly been pretty. But, its not been bad either. I'm making them both sleep outside. But, we got Wolf his own crate last night so now they can both sleep in their own crates. I have tie outs for them that will work till they get too big for your average tie out.

The thing is, if by some fluke chance we do get the 50 acres for sale down the road from us, and I can train Bear and Wolf to protect, herd, and simply do your basic obedience tricks..... Having these two will prove to be the best Idea I ever had. But, they are going to both have to learn to behave better first. I have to teach Wolf from scratch. Bear, well Bear I just need him to start listening better.

Brittney had her first real day of work at the country club with my sister Easter Sunday. She loved it. Shes applying to work at the pool side grill for the summer. She will most likely get the job. The people who will be interviewing her love her and at least one of the members said something nice about her. My baby is growing up. If she gets this job, she will be spending the summer with my mother and sister. It could be worse I suppose. It also gives her some experience so that if she decides to go to work for Ashley, she will have at least a little experience under her.

Dogs

We got a new puppy. He is a beautiful furry ball of energy that doesn't bark. Hes a cross between a Chow-Husky mix and a German Shepard. We named him Bear like my husband because his paws look like baby bear paws.

Picture of Bear

The problem is our other dog Buddy. Now the reason we got the puppy was, since the one cat we had that was willing to play with Buddy died, Buddy has seemed so sad and lonely. I thought a puppy would help matters because dogs are pack animals.

The problem is that I didn't realize exactly how aggressive a dog Buddy really is until we brought Bear home. Now that I stop to think about it, I can see it but I always saw his aggression as trying to protect us. That's before I found out hes killing the Possums that live around here.

We realized he was actually killing the possums and not just dragging them up instead of just finding road kill to play with the same night we brought Bear home. Hubby pulled up in the drive with the puppy, handed the puppy to me and grabbed Buddy's collar. He then looked at the possum and saw that it was breathing. So we have proof that hes killing them.

In that light I have to look back over the last week. He attacked the neighbors dogs that came up the driveway. He nipped at Tristain bad enough his side was red for a few minutes but not bad enough to break the skin or bruise. He killed the Possum. And he tried to bite the puppy twice the night we brought it home.

That was Monday. Since then He has bit my oldest daughter twice, attacked the puppy again twice. Neither of them are bad enough to really hurt but with the puppy it could have been. He has regressed to jumping up on everyone again and barks entirely to much. He keeps jumping the fence around the compost pile. If I can't trust him to not attack the puppy how do I know he won't attack the chickens once they are old enough to go in the coop.

With the way his back leg is hurt (It got hurt before he showed up here) I can't put him in a carrier and he won't get into the van to go to the trainer so if I can't find a trainer to come to him I don't know what we are going to do. I'm not going to make Bear stay in the house because Buddy is mean. But, I can't leave Buddy on the chain all the time either. If we took him to the pound they would end up putting him down due to his aggression. I don't know how to fix it.

I do know that Bear is a few weeks away from being able to leave around Buddy unsupervised anyway but, at this rate, I'm not going to be able to do it until Bear is 6 months old and then he will be big enough and strong enough to fight with buddy for pack position and perhaps run him off, but I don't want that to happen. The idea was that Buddy would be the pack leader but maybe he doesn't have pack leader in him.