She's certainly able to hold herself and will inform us if she needs to visit the outdoors. In rainy weather, she will go up to 12 hours before setting foot outside to pee. There's no particular routine to her rug peeing ways. She'll go for days without an 'accident' and then bam!
So we use puppy pads in the bathroom which works our fine most of the time. Well, there is the small problem of our cat Simon trying to 'cover up' Mona's dirty deeds and creating quite a mess with what he must think is very large cat litter. And Mona does have the uncanny ability to find the one small space where the pads don't overlap. Plus, there are those days when Ledcat or I come racing into the house to use the loo and have to hopskotch our way through the bathroom (especially fun in slippers and/or stocking feet).
We are having the remaing carpeting in the house torn out in the next few weeks and replaced with hardwood floors. There will be a carpet runner on the steps, but that should be relatively safe. She's never touched the entry way mats/rugs (we try to say mats around her).
What does this have to do with cancer? Well, I admit that sometimes I get angry when I have a particularly unpleasant mess to clean up or discover that Simon "The Humper" LeBon has dragged my favorite blanket across Mona's latest conquest. I'm a yeller and when I yell, Mona and her brothers run to hide. Then I calm down and they come back out. We all have a treat and move on with the day. Ledcat thinks we should stop yelling because Mona has cancer. I'm more of a 'lets treat her naturly" mentality.
Honestly, I can't keep this mantra of "Mona has cancer" going in my head at all times. I get annoyed when she does stupid shit and I am displeased when she disobeys. I'm not saying I don't want to apprecite her, but sometimes I enjoy that an entire hour goes by without my thinking about the fact that she's dying even if that hour includes the theft of a cookie, tin of cat food or wet paw prints on the sofa. The normalcy is a blessing itself.
Mona is a willful creature. Our dog trainer, Debby from Pawsitive Reactions, sized her up and the informed Ledcat and me that neither of us had what it takes to break her bad habits. Essentially, we failed obedience school on the very first day. It probably had something to do with Mona's perch on the couch and theft of the training treats while we were working with her siblings. Go figure.
When you instruct her to take action with which she disagrees, she gets a far off look in her eye and affixes herself like a giant adhesive onto whatever surface is handy. That could be the couch from which she is supposed to remove herself to the floor under the kitchen table from whence she should trot out into the wet/cold night for a potty break. Sometimes in a strange bout of crazy, her eyes roll up into her head and she looks at me over her shoulder like I am about to rip her unborn fetus out of her. I tend to wait until the "Marlena is possessed" stuff is over until I address the situation.
When she pees in the house, rug or puppy pad, she sits on the sofa and observes us as we "find" it. Then, even if we say nothing, she runs under the kitchen table. Those are her two favorite vantages from which to observe our wacky behavior, I guess.
Hurrah for no rungs!
No comments:
Post a Comment