Because She's Smarter Than I Am

There are days when I truly feel the burden of being mommy to the smartest dog in the universe. And, since she's also my soul mate (as I wrote in a post that I just realized I never published-- those late-night posts get a little jacked-up sometimes) she communicates her thoughts, wishes and desires sometimes all too well.



Take this morning, for example. Katie rested her head on my knee and told me, with a look of lnging in her beautiful, bottomlessly soulful eyes, that she was hungry-- PLEEEEEASE feed her. Of course! I was delighted. She watched me intently as the kibble hit the botton of her stainless steel bowl and then she locked her border collie eyes on me and watched me walk back across the kitchen floor to the Beans' Playground.



"That's all there is. Finish that and I'll get you something different. But you have to eat this stuff first," We have this conversation several mornings per week, she and I. Katie does not care for this kibble. This is the kibble that was on sale at Target and I didn't think it would be that much different. Well, apparently it is. And she keeps telling me so. Every day.



There's a lot of stuff we've trained Katie to do. She will sit, stay, lay down, play dead at the issuance of "BANG!", and she has never, ever run away. When she was a puppy and had lived with us for a mere ten days, she scaped the back yard through a gap in the fence. I was running out the door to meet a client that morning and you can imagine my surprise when I opened the front door to leave and there, on the porch sat little Katie, tail wagging and a cute little smile on her face. Funny, I always thought the dog was supposed to greet her humans when they returned home, not when they left.



What I'm trying to say is that Katie, like most Border Collies, is often too smart for her own good. She came pe-programmed to play ball and frisbee. She can open drawers and knock on doors. Really. So you can imagine that I wasn't that surprised to one day enter the kitchen and notice a dish towel covered her food bowl. It could have been an accident. It could have been unintentional. It could have been an action performed by the same mischievous little fairies that hide just one sock out of every load of laundry and come in and mess up the bed after Hubby swears he made it. But after it happened twice more, we were pretty sure it was Katie telling me she REALLY didn't like this food.



Did I listen? No. In typical arrogant grown-up fashion I heard her but refused to do anything to accomodate her perfectly reasonable request. I did nothing but tell her to finish her veggies or no dessert. So I guess I brought the subsequent events on myself. This morning I dumped kibble into her bowl in the usual ungracious fashion and she meandered over to the bowl and started pushing it around, probably hoping it would go away. I heard Hubby on his way out the door asking her if she was trying to bury her food, I'm guessing because she was trying to push a towel over the top of the bowl. Right after the Beans went down for their morning nap I jumped into the shower for a quick hose-down, dried off, got dressed and headed out to the kitchen for one last half-cup of coffee. Right away, I noticed the door to the garage was ajar. This is another (one of about a billion) pet peeve as it lets flies into the house. I felt ire at Hubby welling up inside me when I noticed that there was something at the base of the door that wasn't supposed to be there. What was it? Why, it was Katie's food bowl, dumped out over the door jamb, out the door and down the garage step, it contents scattered over the garage floor in protest of their yuckiness.



I surveyed this and considered how to handle it because, after all, Katie is one of my kids. I made two little kissy sounds and heard her nails on the laminate floor behind me a couple of seconds later, turned my head and saw her peering cautiosly around the fridge to see if she was going to be busted. Katie has a complex about getting busted. She ALWAYS thinks she's going to get busted because she went through a phase when she was younger-- anytime Hubby and I would leave, she'd get a pen from the coffee table and chew it up, leaving bits of it on the sofa, the floor the table... you get the idea . She's got a horrible Catholic guilt-complex. Anyway, she came around the corner with those big brown eyes. "Do you really hate it that much baby?" She looked at the mess and then back up at me. "Come help me pick it up," She came out the door and sat down next to me while I scooped the food back into the bowl. She licked at it a couple of times, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it.



As I've been typing, she's gone into the kitchen and finished her food, then come over to sit near me and the Beans. The Beans scream in glee every time they see her and she obliges by bringing her soccer ball (yes, of course it's pink!) over and pressing it right up against the gate so they can stick their fingers through the holes and poke it. She watches over them like a good shepherd watches over her flock. If anything ever happens to me I know she'll make at least as good a mom as I, if not better. Because after all, since she knows how bad it is to have to eat something she doesn't want to, Katie would be one of those moms who would never make her babies eat veggies if they didn't want to. And that's mostly because she's smart enough to know that if I'm not around, she would not only have to clean up her own messes, but those of the Beans as well-- and if she's going to clean up a Bean meaa, it might as well be a tasty one!