We Broke Tutu

My old co-worker used to describe the blog as a detailed catalogue of one man’s failure at raising his children.  Sometimes we forget that I am also failing at raising two dogs. 

Dad’s who didn’t want dogs is an internet cliché, but I fit it to a t. I carry Tutu around like an infant all day every day. I speak to her like an insane person. She is my special baby. Does she know she is my special baby? Does she know how much I love my special baby? 

We also dress her like one of the “Golden Girls.” She has a sweater for every holiday. A little yellow one with “Boo” on the front. And the little red sweater with “Ho ho ho.” Diana’s favorite is a little black number that looks like a tutu. But my all time favorite is the pink and white turtleneck. She is the spitting image of my great aunt Verle whose apartment what also all pink and white except for the occasional splash of dark brown whisky in a glass.

Around Christmas something shifted. Tutu started waking up in the middle of the night to bark. That’s weird. She never barked before. We’d let her out and then she’d calm down. But it steadily got worse. 1am turned into 1am + 3am. And then 1am + 3am + 4am.

Bark bark bark! It was like someone pounding a drywall nail into my ear canal. The sound could penetrate Diana’s deafness and would drive her crazy. She escape to our guest room. Jerry would moan and cry in the corner of the bedroom. Why oh why did you bring this tiny bark machine into our home, Hoomans?

I began to just stare at the ceiling waiting for the barking to start every night. I was getting less and less sleep and was turning into a real a-hole during the day. Something had to be done. 

We began pumping her with enough drugs to drop a water buffalo. We would walk her around the house for an hour before bed to wear her out. I would roust her awake during the day to get her days and nights calibrated. 

And every night and 1, 3 and 4 she would bark. And I would cry.

A few Fridays ago, I was playing Simpsons trivia with my pals (it’s as cool as it sounds) and I got a text from Diana that simply read, “OMG.”

I immediately called her, fearing she had calculated how much I spent on Legos this year. 

Diana had been combing the internet for solutions to our geriatric canine insomniac. She stumbled across an article about dog sweaters. It turns out it’s really bad for dogs to be in sweaters for more than 3 hours at a time. It overheats their little bodies and is super uncomfortable. 

Tutu had been in a sweater non stop since we discovered humiliating sweaters.  We were boiling her every night and her barking was pleas to stop the torture. 

It couldn’t be that simple, could it? That night Diana took off Tutu’s sweater and the slept through the night. And every night since. 

Here endeth the failure.