Princess Dakota

I thought I would dedicate a post to the world's most pampered dog and the first child of the Martinez family, Dakota.:-) Let me explain exactly why Dakota is so spoiled. Since I work from home, Dakota has never had to be alone during the work week and has only experienced a fraction of the crate hours that most puppies would. After sleeping a nice long restful night, you would think that Dakota would be eager to play or get into trouble; instead, as soon as I sit down in my office chair for work at 7:30 AM, Dakota jumps up in my lap and gives me a huge, "sucks that you have to work mom, but, I'm going back to bed," yawn and then she konks out for a good 4 hours in my lap. Now, imagine trying to get your legs under your desk to type on your keyboard all day with a fat Dachshund snoozing away on your lap. It doesn't work! So, instead I have to sit in a very non-ergonomic fashion, somewhat twisted to the side so that Princess Dakota can sleep comfortably and I can attempt to get some work done. Heaven forbid a mail man or a garbage truck drive by while I am on the phone with a customer. Then I have to brace myself for this tiny dog's extremely large bark and then her smaller woofs that can carry on for the next 10 minutes as she tends to be rather on edge after hearing loud noises. To get her to stop barking while I am on the phone I have to think quick and I usually resort to giving Dakota a utility bill or a notepad to chew on or something intriguing enough to distract her from her woofing. Meanwhile, I am hoping the call doesn't last too long as I watch Dakota eagerly desecrate my not so replaceable monthly bills. Then when Dakota decides she is tired of my lap, she runs to our back door and begins scratching it furiously until I decide to let her out. She used to be like normal dogs who only want to go outside when they have to go to the bathroom and then they can't wait to get back inside. Now I never know if she is scratching the back door so that she can get outside and dig a crater sized hole in Joey's irreplaceable sod (this has been a problem lately) or if she truly needs to go to the bathroom. Sometimes I let her out because I figure she might need to go potty and other times I let her out because her 20 minutes of scratching on the back door has caused my left eye to start twitching and my mind to wonder to not so appropirate thoughts of feeding her to our neighbors German Shephard. Just last week I let Dakota hang out in our backyard for a couple of hours so that I could get some work done. That's not asking too much is it? When I got around to checking on her, she had collected a good sized pile of our lawn at the back door and was throwing pieces of it up in the air to catch and then she would roll around in her victory. Sigh. One of Dakota's other specials is that she makes sure we know when she wants more food or water. She walks over to her bowls and if they are not filled to her liking, she sticks her paw inside the bowl and drags it into our view (wherever we might be sitting) and then cocks her head to the side as if to say, "you are the most horrible parents ever, can't you see that my water bowl is empty!!" Then she drags the bowl around in front of us until we realize that she wants a refill. We usually filled it for her because we thought it was cute...we have created a monster!! lol. There is so much more that I could add to this story but alas, I have to get to church so this will have to suffice. We have enjoyed so many laughs on account of Dakota's antics, but I will eave that for another story:-)