Clifford has been having some behavior problems lately. I have considered starting a new blog called WhatCliffordAteorDestroyed.com. His casualties include:
• A bar of soap
• The video cable for the Wii
• A Bible
• The lids of several very expensive shampoo and conditioner bottles
• The cardboard box of a set of poker chips
• His own feces (or maybe Ramona's)
• Various markers, crayons, stamps, stamp pads and pots of paint
• The legs of a toy high chair
• Bills, catalogs, that invitation we failed to respond to
• The bottom of the door to Jason's office
• Half a bottle of lemon furniture polish (the rest created an oil slick all over the hallway)
• The cushion on one recently (and expensively) reupholstered chair (note: for months the chair just seemed lumpy)
While this list is amusing, it is mostly...sad. Poor Clifford. He has never been bright (his mantra: "My head is too small for my body, my brain is too small for my head."), but he has taken a nervous decline that's worrisome, and the lengths that we go to protect him (and our stuff) from himself are getting extreme.
So today I took Clifford to the vet for some bloodwork (thyroid can make older dogs go nuts) and decided it would be beneficial for Lu to go. Educational and all that.
It was a complete comedy. The tech could not get our poor nervous dog to pee, so we ran around the yard at the vet's office being encouraging, but nonchalant. Lu used the distraction to create a grand bouquet of zinnias (despite my alternating cries of, "Clifford, go potty. Lucy, those aren't our flowers and if you pick them—Clifford, go potty." As I paid the bill, I watched Clifford huddled in Lu's carseat as she alternately berated him for sitting in it and yelled for me to hurry up.
The afternoon ended with me catching a specimen of Clifford's pee in our own yard, then trying to get Lu out of her carseat while holding said pee, to her wails of "EW, WHAT IS THAT? THAT'S CLIFFORD'S PEE. GROSS. DON'T TOUCH ME, YOU TOUCHED CLIFFORD'S PEE."
That pee is in my fridge now.