The Gradual Emasculation of Wonderbutt

It Started When He Was a Puppy...

I wasn’t planning to post another Wonderbutt blog again this soon, but, true to type, the bulldog pup had his own ideas.

8-year-old Dimples decided to wear a barrette in her hair last night to Meet the Teacher.  Dimples has not worn barrettes since she was three.  She discovered the box of her baby barrettes the other day, and proceeded to act like she had found a buried treasure, showing me each barrette I had bought for her, and she had refused to wear, like she had made some unique discovery.  “I wonder where this came from,” she would keep saying as I finally resorted to rolling my eyes instead of saying, “I bought it for you!”

This particular barrette of Meet the Teacher honor was suddenly her favorite.  A small metal barrette with a pink bow made of tulle, it suddenly began to adorn, not only her hair, but her new sparkly white newsboy cap.  In the interest of some fashion statement I have yet to translate, Dimples decided to forgo the hat and just go with the barrette last night.  Fine.

We got home from meeting the teacher and finding out that the one person she was happy to have in her class was the one person I wasn’t thrilled about, and I left her to her own devices in the living room with Wonderbutt.

About ten minutes later, the girl-who-has-cried-Wonderbutt far too many times started yelling for me.  “Wonderbutt has my barrette!”

“Well, get it back!” I returned from the back of the house, where I was trying to compose a witty comment to someone else’s blog.

She didn’t, and after the third scream, I meandered out to the living room to fish the darn  barrette out of his mouth.

Nothing there.  The problem was, it wasn’t anywhere else either.  Which left one other place.  Great.

So, I called the emergency vet clinic.  Bear in mind that Wonderbutt was racing around happily chomping on his most annoying squeaky toy while I tried to converse with the nurse.  (Yes, I rhymed that deliberately.)

The vet’s advice via the nurse boiled down to: bring him in so they could induce vomiting OR feed him fiber and hope it would pass.  Based on the fact that he was currently cavorting around the living room and obnoxiously squeaking his toy in the Golden’s face, I decided to choose the latter.

As of this post, I am still checking his Pen of Poop every few hours, hoping to see a pink bow adorning his latest, uh, bowel evacuation.

And back to my Congress and the National Debt reference in a previous Wonderbutt post – you can put a pink bow on it, but it’s still…

Advertisement

An Act of Congress Brought to You by Wonderbutt

So, the other day, when “Stevie”, whom my husband lovingly refers to as “Wonderbutt”, decided to do a major renovation to three of our rooms, I reacted as most people would upon finding that your bulldog has ransacked your house- I attempted to clean it up as fast as I could before my husband came home.

No time to grieve the sopping wet stuffed animals stolen from my daughter’s bed.  No weeping over the flipflop with chew marks all over it.  I set about erasing as much evidence as I could before my husband got home from work – 15 minutes after the initial discovery of the crime.  I was trying to set things straight because, when Wonderbutt did his last redesign that involved ingesting 1/4 of our carpet padding, my husband said, “Maybe we should replace the dog instead of the floor.”

I think he was mostly joking, but I really didn’t want to find out.

Amazingly, my husband arrived home to a partially cleaned up mess, but did not seem too perturbed about it.  At all.  I was slightly surprised.

My daughter, however, was quite upset by this turn of events.  She came running to me with tears in her eyes.

“Daddy won’t get mad at Wonderbutt!”

“Okay…”

“He says it doesn’t make any sense to yell at him now because he won’t know what he did wrong!”

“Thats kind of true.”

“But he made a mess!”

“I know, but he’s a dog, and you have to yell at them when they are in the act so they know what you’re so upset about.”

She gave me a look that pretty clearly stated her lack of confidence in my dog whispering skills, and left the room in a huff.

Her exit left me to reflect on:

1. My relief that my husband was not ready to execute Wonderbutt on the spot for his transgressions,
2. My amazement at how far my husband and I had come in the dog-training department since the puppyhood of our Golden, 10 years ago – yet how completely oblivious our bulldog is to our amazingly stellar skills, and
3. The metaphorical potential of comparing anger at a dog to anger at our politicians for the delightful mess they have made of our national debt crisis.

Yes, I was watching Jon Stewart at the moment.  But, take a look at the preceding dialogue, and substitute Congress in for Wonderbutt and his related pronouns.

It kind of works, doesn’t it?