What's Little and Blue and Comes in a Pill Form?

Just in case someone is still in the dark, we raise dogs. I'm not sure why, but we do. After a few years of dabbling here and there with this breed, this breed and that one too, we've decided to settle on the corgi. The Pembroke Welsh variety to be exact. Wonderful dogs, really, if you can get past the rolling balls of hair that threaten to overtake you as you sleep.

And then last year we decided to expand a bit. As in hey, let's buy 6 dogs in one weekend just because we can. In our defense, some of them weren't ours. See, our two oldest kids had been raising pigs for the fair, and banking the money for college. At the rate they were raking in the dough they just might have had enough ready cash to pay for their books their first semester. If they were really lucky. So all on their own they got the brilliant idea that they could raise dogs. It would be a lot easier than the pigs and they'd make a little more money. Being the stupid morons loving parents that we are, we let them take this plunge. After some research Josh settled on a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. We thought he made such a wise choice that we chose to buy her sister. And to get things really going right, we bought a male that was totally unrelated. We were set. All we had to do was wait for a girl to become of age.

And glory be! Our girl hit the magical time of her life this past week and we were thrilled beyond words to be stripping her of her virginhood. We'd given the male to my in-laws because a male in all his glory living in a house full of girls is not the best idea in the world. We may be dumb, but we're not stupid. So we borrowed Boaz and were giddy with excitement at the thought of all the doggy love that would go on. Spaniel puppies have to be the cutest things in the entire known world and we were going to have some of our very own!

But Bo decided that he was shy in the presence of strangers. He'd start feeling a wee bit amorous and then glance my way with an apologetic expression before retreating to a dark corner. I did what anyone would do in my situation. I locked them in the bathroom together while we left the house for a few hours. When we came back he'd be sporting a big goofy grin and she'd be feeling just a wee bit violated.

But how do you tell if that's the case or not?

We really didn't want to miss puppies this go-round so we hauled their doggie bottoms to the vet. If they're not going to do it naturally we'll just give them a little assistance.

I dropped them off, and went shopping. I was blissfully spending half a paycheck on 37 pounds of puppy food and 44 pounds of dog food for the week when I received the call from the vet. I did the shopping cart sprint to the checkout and rushed to the vet's to claim my knocked up girl and her uncooperative lover.

Only she wasn't.

Boaz did nothing. In fact, he wouldn't even stand at attention in honor of the occasion. This is all starting to sound a little like deja vu. What is it with our stud dogs being duds? Is it something in our water? Is our air too thin here in the mountains?

It turns out that the dog is timid. Yep, timid. Hopefully he'll mature through this and come out of his shell enough to knock a girl up, but for right now there's nothing to do. And there are no little blue pills for dogs - I asked. I was also given very specific instructions on how to violate the dogs myself if I ever feel the need to do so. Which, for the record, probably won't ever happen. There are some things that are worth paying someone else to do.

(And can you even believe that the vet didn't charge me? Not for the time, not for the office visit, not for anything?! I marked the day in red on my calendar.)

As a last-ditch effort, we sent Mattie home with Boaz becaues he's more comfortabe in his own home. The vet and I were 99.999999% sure that it wouldn't make a difference because hello? Apparently his equipment is nonfunctional. But we do employ the live and learn theory in our kennel and we lived and learned. Turns out that Boaz just had performance anxiety because he got himself a little doggie lovin' tonight.

He may be sporting a big goofy grin, but it's not quite as big as mine. (Good boy, Boaz.) If you thought corgi puppies were cute, stay tuned in 9 weeks for those spaniel babies. (And keep your fingers crossed that this was a successful rendezvous and not just a test run.)

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On another kennel-related note, we got this over the weekend. Because we needed another dog.





Tinker Bell is Becky's though, so you can't blame that one on me.