Frankiversary

It’s been a year since we drove to Toronto to meet a dog that we thought might be right for us – and then drove home with the dog.

He went on a walk with the kid, jump into the car and then slept all the way home. We were amazed at how comfortable he seemed almost right away. We knew he was the dog for us.

As we started living with this dog, we started figuring him out. Gradually he started getting more and more comfortable with us, and he became a puppy.

We don’t know how old he actually is, because he’s a rescue and the vet says once they have all their adult teeth you can’t really tell, but he was acting like a new puppy with no limits.

Eventually he was getting in to so much trouble that I started keeping a notebook, because friends on Twitter didn’t believe it all.

It all started innocently enough. I heard a strange noise, went downstairs and found him inside a bad of dog food up to his shoulders.
The next day, again, I heard a strange noise. I thought Joe was downstairs emptying the dishwasher until I realized that he should be gone for the day. I went down and found the dog standing in the dishwasher licking the plates. The dishwasher was not left open. We used to think he wasn’t food motivated.
I got home one day and noticed that the dining room table was wet. That was odd. Then it happened again. Eventually we realized that he was jumping onto the table via one of the chairs and peeing on it. PEEING ON IT.
We started gating him in downstairs, since putting him in the crate caused hours upon hours of crying. He figured out that he could jump onto the living room chair, jump over the back of it onto the stairs and get into the bag of garbage he wasn’t supposed to have access to.
Got home from getting ice cream as a family and found the dishwasher drawer pulled out and the dishes licked clean again.
We had a bag where we kept all the things we had to take with us to his obedience classes. He pulled everything out and ate the bag of treats out of a ziploc bag.
Spent time in the backyard and decided to eat the apples that had fallen out of our tree, then threw up twice upon coming inside.
Got into our pantry cupboard and managed to eat uncooked quinoa and uncooked egg noodles. Threw up three times.
Got a pizza box off the kitchen counter and ate the leftover bones from some chicken wings.
Got a pot off the stove and licked it clean – after I had cooked a roast chicken in it.
Got into the kid’s soccer bag, took her cleats into the living and then ate the two popsicle sticks he found.
Got into the kitchen garbage and ate rotten beef.
Got into some takeout containers, ate leftover raspberries and turned himself pink.
Woke me up at 3 am trying to get onto the dining room table because we had moved the chairs and left a garbage bag on it, out of his reach.
Got into the pantry cupboard again, pulled out three boxes of crackers, a chocolate bar, uncooked penne, raw lentils, and then we moved all the pantry food to a different cupboard.
Then he got into the old pantry cupboard and took out the cookie cutters we were now keeping there and peed on them. Probably because they weren’t edible.
Got into leftover Kraft Dinner, came home to find him orange.
Got into my baking cupboard and ate half a block of shortening and part of a bag of chocolate chips. Then we baby proofed the house.
Then we realized that he could push his way through the gate we had set up at the bottom of the stairs and get anywhere he wanted to. Ordered a baby gate.
“When did he pee there?” has become a not unfamiliar refrain in our house.