Muddy Couches, The Art of Hiding Shoes and Chasing Potato Bugs at 3am

You can't prove that those are my paw prints on your white couch.

       As Hero Hottie has been reminding me, bad puppy equals great dog. I laugh, mostly in a sleep deprived hysterical manner because my couch is covered in mud prints, I have been waken up at 3am to hunt for potato bugs and the girls have had to learn to hide their shoes in a shut room to keep them away from the deadly chewing power of puppy.

     And in fact, Gibson is not a bad puppy. He's a great puppy. All spunk, and intelligence and kindness. There has only been two things we have been very harsh with him, no jumping up on people and no biting, even puppy nibbles.
     Right now, he's a puppy and his jumping is more annoying than damaging but he's a GREAT DANE. Jumping up is not an option for him when he's full grown.
     And I know he's a puppy which requires a lot of chewing and nibbling and puppy play. But lets learn now that you, Gibson, are not a zombie and therefore do not get to nibble on human flesh. He's slowly learning that one. Mostly he's using his puppy nibbles to get Abu's attention when he feels ignored. (Which is whenever she's not paying attention to him.)

      I have desperately tried to keep that cream colored couch clean these last few years from five children. Bean, Abu, CT, Bug and Blueberry. Not an easy feat by any means, short of forbidding them from being on the couch, which my parenting style keeps me from doing.
      But one Great Dane puppy with muddy paws wrecked four years of quickly scrubbing out spills and sticky fingers prints with one giant leap onto the couch.
      I had thought I had wiped him cleaned. When he had come in from the yard, I had halted his eagerness to spread his happiness all around my house with a scrub of the towel. Because I knew he would go right for my couch. He seems to think it's his bed.
     Which I suppose probably makes sense to a little puppy who already believes he's a big dog. And big dogs deserve big beds, right?
      One giant leap for puppy kind right across my living room and onto the couch and I realized as he touched down with all the grace of a football player tackling the quarter back, that somewhere he had hid mud between his puppy paws and it was now being playfully spread across the entire cream colored surface of my couch.

      "Gibson! No!!" I screamed, but he was in a frenzy. Running back and forth, tossing the huge cushions around like they're lightweight balloons. Digging himself into the now messy pile of pillows because he thinks we're playing.
       I grab him, hauling him off the couch and just stare at the damage he has done.
       Scrubbing only gets out most of the mud and I can still see traces of it on the arm of the couch. Which he lays his head on while I'm cleaning and tries to help by chewing on my cleaning rag.

      Such a helpful puppy.
      His expression, as seen in the photo above, is so cute I can almost forgive him. Just like I'm getting over the fact that for a while after he discovered he could wake me up in the middle of the night to go potty outside rather than do it on my living room floor and he would actually be a good dog for waking me up than he decided that meant if he woke me up for any reason he must be a GREAT dog.
      Puppy logic, I'm learning, is a lot like kid logic.

      Hence, the 3am potato bug hunts outside. And he's adorable pouncing on them, chasing them, sniffing them down with his little puppy nose...just not at 3am when I'm standing on my front porch in my pj's wondering if Baby Blueberry will stay asleep when I come back to bed or wake up as soon as my head hits the pillow.
      
     After a few nights of him waking me up just to play outside we finally had a long talk, which involved a bit of scolding, something he hates to hear from me, and now he's only waking me if he has to go. So he's a smart dog too.

     And lucky for him, charming and cute.

     Because I haven't even told you what he did to the recliner chair.