Dammit, Penny!

Okay, so in December of 2016, Holly decided she needed to buy a dog. She wanted another min-pin. I knew from our last min-pin, Fifi, that this particular breed was high-strung, kind of bitchy, and has some serious eating issues (as in eats fast and furious and waaaay too much). So I was not at all enthused with getting another min-pin, although by the end of her time with us (about 6 years, I think) she had become a very nice addition to the family. She, in fact, followed and obeyed me better than any of the other dogs. Still, I strongly urged Holly not to get another min-pin. It’s a LOT of work. But Holly being Holly, she lunged ahead in her headstrong ways and order one. She picked her up in Oklahoma on our way back from visiting family in Arkansas.

Immediately, the difficult process of ramming a square peg in a round hole began. She was a mess and crapped anywhere and everywhere. I was literally picking up poop every single day, and sometimes twice per day. She barked wildly at anything…I mean anything…that walked by the house, flew over ahead, or crept into the yard. She would repeatedly escape from the yard as well, forcing me to have to constantly patch up a new hole she had found/created. The destruction also began as she began chewing and destroying any object within reach of her mouth. She also ate like a starving wild hog. Now I had to monitor food, too, in order to keep her from eating the other dog’s food, as well as overeating (like min-pins do) and getting fat.

It didn’t take long for my stress level to tap out. After about 2 months, I finally had it. I told Holly, “I’m sorry, I just don’t like your dog at all. She’s an asshole!” I was mad that Holly and rammed this creature into our lives with all of its stress and unpleasantly. I seriously wanted to get it out of our house and lives. Of course, Holly responded with the typical defiant/dismissive I’m-not-gonna-change attitude and let the dog remain. However, she did begin to try a little harder to clean up after the dog, as well as take her to obedience classes.

Long story short, Penny has slowly…very very slowly…began to chill out and fit into the home. I found a coping mechanism during this time by tossing out some passive-dismissive snobbery of my own and sending Holly a ‘report’ every time Penny did something bad (which was almost every single day). But my evil plan at sneering Penny away into obscurity backfired as the reports began to get funny. We even invented the flag-phrase ‘dammit penny’ to say the dog has done something bad/annoying again.

Unbeknownst to me, Holly was keeping many of those text messages and photos. Seeing them all in a row now is kind of funny to us. You can see and hear my frustrations. I didn’t try to hide.
But you can also see how Penny has slowly improved. Now, 1 year later, Penny is clearly more mature and obedient. She no longer escapes from the yard. She doesn’t (often) chew things up. She still barks and nips at people, but even that is improving as she is obviously figuring out how to play with humans. She played very well with the neighbor kids last week when they were here. So I guess Penny will be okay in time. It will be take awhile. She actually jumped up on the bed and laid down on my lap for the first time ever a few days ago. Progress!

Maybe these aren’t funny to anyone else, but it is to us. Perhaps it is one of those ‘you had to be there’ sort of things? Whatever the case, these are many of the screen-grabs of throughout the year of 2017: