dog day afternoon
 
I’m nearing my proverbial wit’s end, and I really don’t know what to do about this.  I’ve written before about how The Pumpkin “plays” with our family dog, Waldo the WonderMutt (a.k.a. The Notorious D.O.G.).  Well, the pretend play has escalated to more than just a little roughness.  Part of me expects to be told that I’m overreacting, that she’s a 22-month-old toddler and that’s how toddlers act, that she’s not even close to some sociopathic mini-bully from an episode of “Super Nanny” going after the household pets with knives and bats.  But the rest of me—most of me, actually—is genuinely frustrated and worried.  And I don’t know what to do.
 
I have to put The Pumpkin in time-out at least once a day for hitting Waldo, kicking Waldo, throwing toys at him, or flinging herself at him.  Mind you, none of this is malicious, she’s not trying to get a rise out of him or hurt him—she’s playing.  But that’s the problem.  Our dog is a sweetheart, and he loves everybody [okay, everybody except the gardener, the pool cleaner, and the postal worker]—when our babygirl first came home, he started sleeping on his long-abandoned bed in our room again and would go sniff around the pack-n-play whenever she cried in the night, as if to check on her, to see if she was okay.  We got him at the SPCA as an abandoned 3-year-old, and were told that he was half Bassett hound, half golden retriever [yeah, imagine that one].  All he wants to do is roll over to get pet, as if he wasn’t low enough to the ground already.  And yes, since our babygirl’s arrival, he’s been neglected.  But he’s never gotten mean, or acted jealous (though he does try to force you to pet him by shoving his head under your hand, the poor love-starved lug).  And The Pumpkin loves him too, loves walking him in the morning, and chasing him around the kitchen, and trying to get him to lick her face while she’s hanging upside-down from my lap.
 
But she just doesn’t get that she can’t play in such a way that could hurt him, and, my worst fear, make him lash out in pain or fear and hurt her.  She just doesn’t get that that low sound coming out of his throat when she repeated shoves her face in his, singing all the while, when he’s at eye-level on the futon isn’t a good sound, that that means he doesn’t like it.  She doesn’t understand that, though she seems little and he seems big, it could hurt him for her to try to climb on his elongated golden back on his stubby Bassett legs, that she shouldn’t lean on him or press on his belly like that.  And that playing with him—with anyone—does not include hitting or kicking or pushing or throwing things.
 
And so I put her in time-out.  And when she does it again, I double, triple the time (I only start with a minute, folks).  Sometimes, she doesn’t get it at all, sits there smiling, laughing, ‘til the timer goes off.  Other times, she knows—knows what she did, and that I’m not happy.  She’ll cry in time-out, or if I take Waldo outside.  I explain what she did, why it’s wrong, how we don’t hurt people or animals, how he could hurt her by accident if she hurts him.  “No hit Waldo, okay?”  She learned to parrot this pretty fast, and will say it, tearfully, when she comes out of time-out.  But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause I keep having to do it, over and over again.
 
And then there’s the other side of the coin.  “Nooooo, Waldo!”  I just got a BabyCenter update for “21 months, 4th week” suggesting that current fears and phobias probably started with an incident—the arachnophobe toddler who once found a spider on his arm, for example.  Well, I know that, at least once, when The Pumpkin was younger and less ambulatory, Waldo did eat food that was either in her hand or that she had just dropped.  But this isn’t fear.  This is paranoia.  She doesn’t run from Waldo when she’s eating, fearing that he’ll steal her food.  This is preemptive.  This is yelling, from across the room—he doesn’t even have to be in the house, and she doesn’t even have to be holding food.  This morning, upon first seeing him in the breezeway through the clear glass of the side door, the first thing she said to him wasn’t “Hi,” it was “No!”  And of course, the yelling can, and does, lead to pushing.
 
I thought that maybe she’d react like this to all dogs.  But no, this weekend at a birthday party, she was all “Oh, doggie” to a big, slow yellow lab that hardly ever got up off the floor, and what did she do, without incident or voice-raising?  She ate chips inches from his face, cooing “Oh, doggie.”  And it’s not like this is unprecedented, either.  She gets timed-out or warned at least every other time she plays with her best friend, whom she yells “No!” at for even being in the proximity of a toy that she’s laid claim on (but, of course, isn’t actually playing with)—pushing often ensues.  And again, we talk to her, we explain, we time-out.  I can’t buy the “this is how toddlers act” excuse.  But then what do we do?
 
How do we make it sink in that she can play without pushing, or reassure her that the dog whom she loves to pet and play with is not gonna take her food (and even if she thinks he is, she can deal with it without pushing or yelling)?  Once in a while, when tired out by a day of this [and again, it’s not like she does this all time, or that I can’t let her play with him at all, it just gets frustrating, is all], I flash forward to a future in which The Pumpkin is a big sister, and I freak out.  What will she do when there actually is another being in the house purposely and purposefully trying to take her toys, her food, and her parents’ attention from her?  How will she act then?  Is this all really just a phase and I should just chill out?  Or what?
Tuesday, August 22, 2006