November is always a busy month. For the past ten years, I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month (a yearly contest where you attempt to write a 50,000 word novel across a 30-day period), and the last four of those, I have also served as Municipal Liaison for the Pittsburgh region, which means that my November is mostly full of writing and scrambling around to organize events, plus family time for Thanksgiving, oh, and working on this blog…
So with that in mind, we decided to celebrate Lucy’s birthday (which is actually on July 4th, but was not recognized with a party because of the home improvements we were working on in the summer) as a combination with our two November birthdays: my dad, and my parents’ dog Piper.
Piper and Lucy are not the best of friends, because Piper is an old, grumpy woman, and Lucy is a bouncy, hyper baby. This is probably payback for when Piper was a little baby and used to torment the old woman neighbor dog, Cookie, who taught Piper a lesson about bothering the elderly in the canine world, by taking a nice chunk out of her side.
However, Piper and Lucy *usually* tolerate each other, except in the event that Piper thinks her food is threatened by a hungry little red dog. Lucy was starved and abandoned before we rescued her, so she sometimes has flashbacks to when she was scrounging for food in a dumpster behind a Dairy Queen. For this reason, we had to get her trained in Mighty Dog Academy to keep them separate during food time, so this ‘party’ had to take place in two separate rooms.
Lucy, being a polite little lady, sat nicely in front of her cheeseburger cake (Michael made each of the dogs little personal cheeseburgers, and I put (unlit) candles in them.
While it was very hard for her to behave so well, she sat perfectly still and waited until she was allowed to eat her cheeseburger, which she nibbled delicately on as Michael fed her little bites.
Piper, on the other hand, was like her typical self: a lab-mix crazed for food, made worse because she’s presently on prednisone for her nose lupus. So… this is the best picture we could get of her with her cheeseburger…
…before she ate it in two bites. Yes, two bites. She tried to eat the candle too, but my mum managed to pull it out of her mouth before she could swalllow it.
All that remained was a slightly guilty look in her eyes and a few crumbs on her plate.
We could only get her to sit still for a photo in her birthday hat (which I made, for the record – cute, right??) once we promised her another nibble of a cheeseburger if she sat for three seconds.
Meanwhile, Lucy decided to wear her birthday hat at a more Lady-GaGa-esque angle, which she thought highlighted her exquisite taste in fashion.
Unfortunately, shortly after these lovely photos were taken, we had some minor dog cheeseburger paranoia, which ended in Piper having to take some of her crazy pills to calm her down, and Lucy requiring an intense amount of snuggling to be reassured that everything was okay.
The girls were punished by not being able to open their presents until morning.
But we still allowed Lucy to help her Grandpa open his! (He got a hat from the Motown Museum. Lucy got a large tug rope. Piper got a new monkey. Lucy will probably chew all three of these items at one point or another.)
All in all, aside for the mini cheeseburger brawl, a fun evening was had by everyone: the 2.5-year-old birthday pup, the 11-year-old birthday dog, and the 61-year-old birthday dad.