Dog for Sale - free kid included in the price

I was just getting over a touch of the Mummy-taxi blues, having driven Poppet, Pickle and Nobby to their separate play-dates on Saturday morning - parties for the kids, football tournament for Nobby; Pickle pipes up with 'what are you going to do for the next four hours Mummy?' as I handed him the birthday present I had chosen, bought and wrapped for his little friend, GRRRR....

Today was going relatively smoothly by comparison and Mummy went on her own play-date with some of her favourite shops, dragging the rest of them along for the ride. Retail therapy has been on the cards since my first trip to the vet with Tiggy on Wednesday evening where I found out she has a heart problem. It's pretty worrying actually. She'd been acting like a little old lady for a while, not so much running about with other dogs, happy to sit in her kennel all day and panting a lot. I thought at first it was all the extra weight she's packed on recently but apparently not. The vet treated her every day for the rest of the week, including 8am Saturday morning (highly anti-social in my book but needs must) when he took a few vials of blood to test for Lyme Disease, eek. Meanwhile she's not to exercise for fear of exacerbating the heart problem.

So now we are operating something of a shift system in the garden with her mate Ike from next door. We do have a fence and we do have a couple of gates but so determined are these dogs to wrestle the living daylights out of each other the fence is looking like a swiss cheese so the gates are pretty much useless too. It also turns out that Tiggy has been sneaking next door in the mornings after I leave for school and eating Ike's breakfast. He's still a pup so he has two meals a day and our wiley old dog has devised various decoy strategies to lure him away from his bowl so she can help herself. No wonder she's been getting podgy. That's another part of her treatment - diet.

Oh, and carrot.

Plus the odd espresso.

Yup, I'm sure the man knows what he's doing. The carrot is for fibre to help the weight loss although she really doesn't like it. First night I diced the carrot and mixed it in the biscuits but she proceeded to spit out all the carrot and just eat the biscuits. I had carrot all over the floor - that told me didn't it. So tonight I grated it up really small so it would stick all over the biscuits... somehow there was still about half a carrot left in the bowl afterwards. This dog has skill.

The espresso is to try and raise her heart rate because it is permanently slower than normal, it doesn't increase even after a good run about with Ike. So the vet suggested trying caffeine. So I made her and me a little coffee the other day; would she go near it? Nope. I reported back to the vet that she didn't want her Lavazza; he gave me a 12ml syringe. Oh the joy. Picture if you will a 25kg dog wedged between my legs and me trying to squirt warm coffee down her throat. And then please tell me how you get coffee stains out of white cotton... note to self, wear overalls when medicating the doggy.

So it has been fun this week, not. And then Poppet comes in crying this evening after a trampolining fight with her brother holding her wrist and swearing blind he jumped on it and 'it feels broken'.

Crap.

See, last time she did this (told me her wrist felt broken after a fall on the spiral staircase) mummy didn't believe her and just rubbed in some Arnica. 24 hours later she was still complaining so I sent her off with her Dad for an x-ray, telling her not to be such a drama queen and lo and behold: a fractured wrist.

This time I wasn't sure though. Little girls get very attention seeky at nine years old and frankly I couldn't tell the difference between the fuss she was making for this allegedly broken wrist and the high pitched ballyhoo when her brother was squirting her with the plant sprayer. What do you do?

So we went to the hospital, with me quizzing her all the way about how it happened; somehow the story kept changing. In the waiting room she decided it probably wasn't broken after all and we should go home. Well, nasty Mummy made her go through with the examination and x-ray just to see if she was willing to stick with her story. You'll be pleased to know there was no fracture, the doc reckoned she saw a 'contusion' and wrote her a note to be let off PE for two weeks... me, I'm not sure how you see a bruise on an x-ray but I thanked her anyway.

So please cross everything that Pickle and Nobby can stay fit and healthy for the coming week or I will have to take out more adverts to move 'em all on. I have my final essay deadline looming next Saturday night. I have to choose 4000 words about formative assessment and put them in a meaningful order and then I am FINISHED!! But I can't see my getting it all done if all I'm doing is taxiing family members to various medical appointments. I've already been hijacked to stand in for Rose at a lunch with her Mum tomorrow since she couldn't get over when the ash cloud hit.

So send happy thoughts... and if you're interested in taking on a slightly used dog and an over-acting pre-teen do let me know.