My daughter wants a dog. Not a stuffed one (she has about three dozen of those)—a real, live puppy that will lick her face when she enters the door. What’s a mother to do? I think I bought some time by ordering her a battery-operated toy puppy that claims to “lick” faces. We’ll see how it goes.
For the record I have nothing against dogs, it’s just that our home and lifestyle are not exactly conducive to having a pet right now. Try explaining that to a strong-willed 2-year-old. It wasn’t easy… but for a split second I actually thought about ways we could accommodate a growing dog.
The idea of pet-proofing our home was a bit more than I could handle. If you have a pet then you know what I am talking about. It begins when you decide which parts of the house you want to share with your four-legged friends. My friend has two dogs so I know that unsupervised freedom is not a given—it should be earned. I spent many days watching her dogs watch us through child gates (used to confine them to certain areas). In other rooms doors that were kept opened pre-dogs are now closed to keep Bruno and Bully out.
Before bringing her dogs home, my pet-loving friend actually got down on the floor and surveyed her home from a pet’s eye view. Now that the dogs are home, the floor is free of items they would be tempted to steal—socks, food, candy, empty containers, plastic bags, etc. She also put away the bottle of bleach and the bag of fertilizer she used to keep in the corner of the spare bathroom.
One of the last changes she made to her home was to purchase trash cans with lids and make sure the lids on all of her toilets were kept closed (a dog doesn’t know if you have just poured potentially deadly cleaning solutions in the toilet prior to drinking from it). Pet-proofing your home is not unlike baby-proofing it. But you have to be even more vigilant since dogs and cats often master skills (like jumping on counters) faster than children.
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