It Is Mine...therfore I must.....

PEE on it! Yes, our little boy has reached another stage in his development. While he is not lifting his leg to pee, he has discovered the power to mark things. Today while walking our little boy after the coyote/hound incident Torean could not walk more than three steps without veering into the snow banks to make sure he left a little piddle calling card. By the time we were done walking, the pristine white snow was marred with plenty of his yellow gifts, and Torean was immensely pleased with himself. That furry butt of his could not have swung anymore than what it did as he walked up the steps, then he had to look back to make sure he got most of his potty area before it passed inspection and he went inside. He has exhausted himself again, and is content to be lazy sliding himself across the floor until he flips over without having to get up. The snow better beware when the day comes that Torean learns how to lift his leg. Nothing will be safe and the entire world will be able to see his various designs, while the neighborhood dogs will be sure to know where Torean turf is. Love this little nut <3

Is it tail or....TOY!!

Torean has thoroughly exhausted himself playing in the snow today so time to pen another blog about the snow puppy. The snow is still coming as I write which means more playtime and walks tomorrow while Torean sleeps near my feet, on his chain at the moment because he won't stop stealing shoes and socks today! For the most part Torean is being a very good puppy aside from the slow leak plaguing his butt and us. Torean has rediscovered an old play toy, the wagging thing attached to his butt that just won't come off no matter how hard he pulls at it. Round and round he goes, when he stop nobody knows. Currently Torean thinks that if he grabs his tail in his teeth really hard, then puts his paw over his tail while he is biting it, he just might get that tormenting toy off, but to no avail. Round and round he goes some more, until he gets dizzy and plops down on his butt with his tongue hanging out sideways, his eyes glazed. Rest for awhile, then back at it again, or biting his feet because he finds it fascinating. At first we thought Torean was doing it because he was bored, so we put more toys down, kept up with his play sessions, but no, he just likes playing with his tail. Such a silly puppytash. <3

Crumbs and Super Sensitive Sniffers

Since I seem to have developed a sort of writers block, I guess this topic shall be about Torean, his new developments, and the fun he has encountered during his walks this week.

     This past week Torean has amazed us with two new quirks to his repertoire of puppiness. Super sonic sniffing, and the ever popular scrounging for......wait for it....... CRUMBS! GLORIOUS MINISCULE CRUMBS! NOM NOM NOM!!! Crumbs so small that not even we can see them, but his nose knows they must be there. The power of his nose never fails to amaze us, neither does his persistence to get to the tasties he knows have to be around somewhere...taunting him...lurking in the shadows,,,multiplying like dust bunnies..Earlier Torean presented us a lovely view of his ever widening backside as he jammed himself under the stool sniffing his customary places in hopes there might be food for him..thankfully no SBD'S followed that incident but I was tempted to get an Elkie butt shot until he moved..OF COURSE. We learned our lesson after the first day of begging/sniffing and we have moved anything that he might find interesting way out of his reach in case he gets the bouncies. And of course if we say anything, Torean gives us the offended-who?-me? look and goes into his corner for pouting of which he is the master of. When Torean gets the sniffers I am certain we can hear it from the other side of the house, and of course he is diligent in making sure everything is covered before he goes to demolish his toys. Cockiness has been the norm the past few days as well, I have lost count the number of times Blizzard batted him across the face yesterday because he would not leave her alone. Torean did finally drop to the floor and look at us trying to understand why the black meanie was teasing him. He didn't do anything of course...he was the ever innocent moose dog who would never dream of teasing the cats.........(yeah right!)  Torean is slowly learning to leave the kitties alone, and for all of her toadiness towards the puppy, Blizzard would hate to get caught kind of liking to play with him. As you can guess nothing is quiet in this house except right now when all of the critters are sound asleep with Torean doing the on his back snoozing thing. It's a hard life teasing kitties, scrounging, going for walks, playing in the snow, chasing our tail, testing Mommy and Daddy's patience and seeing what we can get away with.


   The other day we took Torean to the little park just up the road and let him play in the nice packy snow where he proceeded to sniff to his hearts content, eat enough snow to float and chase snowballs until he came home and dropped in the middle of the floor exhausted. We knew he was tired when he sat still for his brushing without trying to bite the brush or run off to chase a toy. He knows he has to sit still for his brushing, but the puppy in him demands he make it difficult. His mouthiness has backed off being replaced by his other habits until he gets bored with them and moves on to something else, like trying to chew on his crate and biting feet which really gets him in trouble! But I get off topic AGAIN! Something I do so well heh heh. Torean has been walking like a champ with the help of the EZ walk harness and some more training, we are so proud of him with the progress he is making. Torean loves the little park down the road even though he can't come off his leash to play because there is a road and a river there and he is far too snortie right now to concentrate. He does not seem to mind though because there is enough to keep him interested. When winter comes to an end there will be plenty of spring and summer smells for him to discover, and more things to do outside like hiking, and more walking, and all the fun stuff that makes a tired puppy. Winter has given him plenty of fun as well, and we know Torean will be blue to see it leave. We already have some summer travel plans made with him and we will be curious to see what his reaction to water will be as he religiously tries to avoid any little bit of water on the sidewalks because the snow is melting. Apparently it is acceptable for me to walk through it because his lard tries to shove me over so he does not have to get his pattie paws wet. All of these make us love Torean more even when he is frustrating, and hopefully someday we can add another fur baby to our little family and give Torean another furry playmate who won't hiss at him and slap him across the face maybe.. Anyways I hope you all enjoy this blog, and have a great weekend.

Love

Short and sweet this time around. Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

From,

Will, Anna and Torean Alaistair.

The Critters

Since I have talked so much about Torean I thought that maybe this blog would be about the other critters that make this place a madhouse on most days. And I would also like to wish our bouncing little troublemaker a happy six month birthday today. I don't think Torean shares our sentiment though considering he has spent most of the day sleeping on his back, his favorite position, and now that he is awake, he seems even more unimpressed with his special day. Hopefully tomorrow will improve slightly so that he can go on an extra long walk to celebrate his day. Thankfully the madness in the house has calmed down since my last post, and now the antics we have come from the fact that a storm was coming and they all felt it. Torean has just been Torean while the cats have torn up the house chasing each other and bouncing anything that moves. So on we go, to the critters that make up our house starting with the oldest.

    Malcolm Octavious and Sophie Claire,

Malcolm and Sophie were found behind a store wedged behind an ice machine, scared to death and extremely hungry when they were found. It was obvious, that like the rest of our cats, they had been abandoned as kittens. It took over an hour before they were coaxed out and put into an empty box before they came home to us. When I opened the box on the stove a pair of green eyes and a pair of golden eyes were staring up at me, and we were smitten. Malcolm was friendly right off, while Sophie took a few hours of love and snuggling before she started purring and did not stop. Malcolm has a great temperament but around other cats he is not so good so he has the run of the basement doing as he pleases. Sophie on the other hand is still hoping she can have the run of the house, but she has grudgingly settled back on her spot on the back of the chair in the dining room waiting for her next chance to be free. With us and other cats she is all right, but around new people she becomes extremely frightened still so we let her be her. Both of them can be maddening, but their attitudes can sometimes be hysterical.

   Vagabond D. Butt (aka Bond) aka (Tubbnuts) aka (His royal tudness)

Bond came to us as another stray, abandoned in the middle of the winter, and taking refuge in our barn to be warm. When I found him it took almost twenty minutes of coaxing before he came to me and we put food down for him. Bond then migrated to the back porch where he had his own little nest until the winter got colder and he froze the tips of his ears off. Bond then migrated into the kitchen so that he would be warm. He settled into the kitchen and his favorite box by the window. During the day he got to go out and at night he would almost always come back and ask to be let in. This continued for quite awhile until one night Bond didn't come back, and he didn't come back. For three days he was gone, and we were sick calling our hearts out hoping we could find him. Then when it was almost midnight we went out to call Bond again, and he came back, badly hurt by something he had tangled with. He was dehydrated with a bad infection, the skin underneath his jaw hanging down. We were sick and unable to get ahold of a vet until morning, so we put Bond in a box on the back porch and hoped he could hang on. Come morning Bond was still alive, and we realized that his injury was not as horrific as we first thought and the vet squeezed us in once my Mom was home from work. Bond went into surgery as they tried to sew his skin back up, but the weight of it was too heavy and kept pulling free, so back to the vet we went, and this time they took a V of skin out of the injury and stretched it across. This time it held and Bond could finally come home. He had to wear a soft blue collar around his neck, a blooming tulip, as the vet called it, and Bond was on a baby food diet. 8-9 cans of baby food a day because his highness got picky, and we had to make sure he stayed clean and didn't dig his stitches out. He became the darling of the vets office during his multiple vet visits and it took three paychecks before he was paid off. Now Bond is a strictly inside cat except for the few times he has managed to sneak out the door and he is very spoiled rotten. He has no skin underneath his bottom teeth, surgery was an option, but since Bond was so happy and healthy we decided not to have the surgery, and he has done quite well without it. Bond has a soft spot in all of our hearts because we came so close to losing him, and what a ham he is.











    Lucky Daisy Belle

Daisy as she is lovingly called came to us as a four week old kitten eighteen months to the day since my grandma had passed away. My father and some of the men at the cement plant he works at found her. They had tried to catch her before but Daisy kept eluding them always finding some place to hide with no mother in sight. When they found her again she was behind the garage nearly dead to the point they weren't going to try and save her. Then one of my Dad's friends decided to take Daisy home for the night to see if he could help her and somehow she pulled through and my Dad brought her home the next day in a box. When I saw him carrying that box the way he did, and by the way he was acting, my first words were What the heck do you have, and Mom is going to kill you. Then he opened the box up on the stove and there were the cutest little pair of blue eyes you ever saw, and I was hooked. I lifted her out and held her rubbing her soft little head and waiting for Mom to get home. My sister took her for me for a little while then I took her back. Daisy was starving and she made her protests well known until I settled her in the crook of my arm and she calmed right down purring and nestling in until my Mom came home. When my Mom came home Daisy knew how important her approval was and she made herself as precious as she could be sitting in my hand and looking at Mom with every bit of cuteness she had. Mom took one look at her and said Name her. We went to Walmart and got Daisy kitten milk replacer and thanks to a tip from someone, a little bit of Ensure in each dose of kitten milk replacer. Daisy took to it immediately and she grew like a weed. When Daisy first came home she was tiny enough to fit in my hand, snuggle under my chin when she wanted warmth and sleep on my laptop in the space between my left cursor button to the edge of my laptop and fit. She is still precious even at three years old, and she has a soft spot in my heart because of the sweet personality she still has.

   Blizzard Elizabeth, (aka Blizzabeth)

Blizzard came to us about a month after we had Daisy at about a week younger and again, the victim of someone going through and throwing animals out like they were garbage. I never would have known there was an animal around the house if someone walking by had not stopped my sister asking if we had a cat out. Apparently the cat had been crying loud enough that he had been afraid a cat had been trapped and he actively looked around before giving up and moving on. I almost did not hear Blizzard until I stopped to take one last listen before we went grocery shopping. It was starting to rain, then all of the sudden I heard Blizzard crying her heart out using her last bit of energy in hopes someone would hear her. I searched and called for her finally seeing this tiny kitten hiding underneath the pine tree out back. She wanted to come so badly to me that she was kneading the ground and purring loud enough to wake the dead but she was scared to come to me as well. Finally Blizzard came and I rushed her inside wrapping her up and putting her in front of the heater. We got her some milk and after a couple road bumps she started growing and playing with Daisy. The two of them can still make us laugh when we think about the antics they used to pull together and still do.

                                                                     Blizzabird!






   Then there is Lindy, my sweet parakeet. Lindy is a quieter parakeet than what my old parakeet Claudie Bob was, but she can still make me laugh especially when she gets caught beating on one of her toys, or watching us chase Sophie around. She doesn't sing constantly, she prefers to wait until it is quiet, then she erupts chirping so loud that she bounces herself off the perch or she bobs her head up and down while she is screeching. She is still a baby but having her adds so much more to the house.


   And finally, there is ShrimpLouie, aka Louie, or his royal fishness,

I got ShrimpLouie out of Petco when he was no bigger than a pencil eraser and I had my doubts about how a fish so tiny could survive. I have always had a weakness for beta fish, and his gorgeous colors were so bright even as a baby.   I brought ShrimpLouie home anyways, despite his tininess,  and put him in a tank that somehow managed to swallow him up because he was so little. Little by little, the Shrimp started to get bigger and his gorgeous deep purple red color came out, colors that he loves to show off every chance he gets. ShrimpLouie is my favorite beta out of all of them that I have had, so much so that before we left for Ohio to pick up Torean we stayed up until after midnight constructing a cage to go around the tank so that the cats could not get to Shrimpie. Pathetic yes, but the cage was one of the best things we ever built, and I still use it, and it deters curious little pussy cats quite nicely. The main reason I am concerned about Shrimpie's safety now is because he apparently has a death wish, and has managed to use up most of his fishy lives. During one of his last tank cleanings we put Shrimp in the same container we always do to protect him while the tank is being cleaned and filled. Well, during that cleaning Shrimpie got it in his head to explore outside the boundaries of his container, and how he stayed alive with the cats around is beyond me. Shrimpie managed to jump out of his container on the shelf, hit the desk, and fall to the floor staying out of his water for minutes longer than he should have. When we found him, my Mom scooped him up and held him in his tank water for over ten minutes until he finally started swimming on his own, and now he has completely recovered from his excursion. But how he survived is still beyond us. Shrimpie always cracked us up when he was growing because he wasn't quite big enough to fluff his beard out, but he would still try to fluff. When he finally had a beard for the longest time he could only fluff one side out so he looked completely ridiculous and adorable at the same time. Shrimpie is almost a year old now, and just as arrogant as ever. Just another creature that has made their way into my heart.


   That concludes my run through of our critters, and I hoped you enjoy reading it. Time to make Torean his birthday biscuit dinner and give him a special laser pointer play time before bed. Have a great night everyone.

Such trouble, and wacky animals.

Oh, Torean, how much trouble your little elkhound self can get into in just a few days. Whether it be chewing two leashes in half because you can, or teasing the cats to the point of almost getting your precious nose scratched more than a few times, you really are a bundle of trouble. Because of your leash chewing we had to make it uptown to find something that you can not chew in half, and you got even by having some of your nastiest SBD's yet. Brushing you was an adventure because even though you enjoy being brushed, you just can't resist trying to bite and chew the brush. Your puppy fuzzy shedding was in full bloom yesterday coating the brush, the floor and me with your fuzziness, but we don't mind because it means more of your fur we can send in to be made into yarn. As you lay at my feet now, all perfect and innocent, none of us are fooled because we know your next windup is coming. Torean has discovered the love of a laser pointer, and now he would happily spend hours trying to chase it around the room, even when we put the pointer down he is still looking for it to play with. Another one of his toys bit the dust last night shredded to the point that it can't be sewed back up so hopefully we can find another one in the store for him. The weather outside is perfect right now for a longer walk today once Torean winds down some. The EZ walk harness has been a huge boon to Torean's walk training, and he is slowly starting to show some progress with only a few flare ups of bad behavior which is normal for him. We switched to walking Torean mostly at night now because he tends to focus more on who is walking him, while during the day time his attention is everywhere except on walking. So today will be a good test of how he does during the day with the EZ walk, and even if he is too hyper, any walk he gets will be good for him. I would have to say that Torean's worst behavior the past few days has been trying to block the cats from coming into the living room acting like he has never seen them before, but once he gets hissed at a few times he will lose interest and go back to something else. And now that Torean's exploits have been explained I thought I might talk a little bit more about our other critters, mostly the cats.

       I can't lay the blame solely on Torean though, we swear all the animals in the house have been loony doing things they normally wouldn't do, and being naughty when they usually are extremely good about staying out of things. Especially Sophie. Sophie is our oldest cat, and because of some abuse she suffered from her previous owners, Sophie has always been a little bit on the off side in the terms of becoming obsessed with one thing in particular, or preferring to spend the past few years sitting on the back of an old chair instead of on some nice flat surface she can't fall off of, among other things,  and she has managed to make Torean's antics seem plain. Sophie has decided that she does not want to be in the dining room anymore, she wants to be in the oldest darkest part of the house which would not be so bad, if we did not let an unneutered male have the run of the room, so now we are hoping Sophie's escapades have not magically gotten her pregnant. We never tried to get Sophie spayed because while she is fine with us, a new situation panics her to the point that we don't want to risk her health. She has mastered the art of popping doors, so we now have a lock on the dining room door to keep her from escaping so now she tries to run out under someone's feet. We are all hoping she gets out of her escape phase soon because having to chase her up and down the stairs is quickly becoming old. My parakeet Lindy finds all of this extremely amusing and when we are shooing cats back into their appropriate rooms she will sit there and screech and flap all over her cage while watching the door to see what is happening. All these crazy personalities are why we love our animals, and I hope their antics will make you laugh as well. Have a great week everyone!

Norwegian Elkhound Puppy, part two

Since it has been months since I continued with Torean's story, I figured I would devote this blog to finish up our story. To backtrack some, my husband has been out of the Navy for a year now, and a Norwegian Elkhound has been his dream dog for years. So once he got out of the Navy, we renewed our search for an Elkhound puppy. It took a great deal of searching but we finally found a breeder in Ohio when the puppies she had were only a day old. As luck would have it, we had already been planning a trip to Ohio to see my husbands family around the time the puppies would be ready to go to their new homes. So we adjusted our trip a little bit, then spent the next six weeks getting ready for the little fuzzball who has graced our lives now. Getting a kennel outside for him was our last investment before we hit the road, stopping in PA to see my sister before we headed on to Ohio. When we arrived at the breeders house we were met by a swarm of identical looking fuzzy puppies, and at that time it seemed impossible to decide which puppy was going to be ours. Then we moved into the kitchen where we sat down and watched the puppies play and interact with each other. Finally, one puppy crawled on my husbands lap giving him kisses and settling down choosing my husband. Once we had Torean it was off to my mother in laws house which happened to be about ten minutes away where he got thoroughly spoiled, then it was a two hour drive back to our hotel. Torean's first night was a bit rough until we realized that the reason he was crying was because he needed to go outside to potty, and that he was a little bit homesick wanting to be with us, not baby gated in the bathroom. Torean's next few days were spent meeting my husbands family, then it was time to head home, and boy did Torean whine and cry up a storm! Lesson number two was learned then. Torean did not like the sun hitting him, so he was trying his best to let us know and try to escape it. So, we hit the AC and rigged up an umbrella and Torean then handled his two day journey back to NY very well meeting some more family along the way. Torean was the delight of the pit stops meeting so many people who fell in love with his fluffy puppy face and wanted to snuggle him. How could anyone resist such a little fuzzie ball with a face like his??? When we got home we were prepared for his aversion to being hot and rigged up our room so he could keep cool without catching cold, and our little guy started sleeping almost all night long. My father fell in instant love, so did my sister and her husband. It is true what they say about elkie love, and maybe some day we will be ready to add another one to our family. Until then, Torean is going to be enough for us.  Since bringing him home,  Torean's world has been opened up to cats that still don't like him, grass he can pluck and dig up, worms, oh those slimy worms, and so many other things, and there is still so much he has yet to experience. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of Torean's tale, and knowing him, I won't run out of writing material any time soon.