Pawcurious Vet Blog: With Pet Blogger and Veterinarian Dr. V

Dr V, purveyor of poisonous crafts and ideas

I like spending time with my family. We do crafty things, because they’re fun and everyone enjoys them. One of our traditions, started back when my daughter was in kindergarten, is to make little Valentine’s Day trinket boxes to send to school on Valentine’s Day- a craft I found on the Martha Stewart website and immediately fell in love with. It’s a cute craft- you take empty matchboxes, cover them with scrapbook paper and ribbons, and fill them with conversation hearts. It’s simple, sweet, and it’s always gone over well.

Until this year.

Last Friday, as I was at home recovering from the jetlag of my Westminster trip, I was interrupted in my reverie by a phone call from the school principal, who called to let me know that she had received “multiple complaints” about my little craft. My immediate thought was, oh no, the kids forgot to remove the matches from some of the boxes, but that wasn’t it. Some parents were just mortified that I used matchboxes for a craft. The principal patiently explained, in the same tone one might explain to a kindergartner why gargling with Drano is a bad idea, about the dangers of sulfur residue. Then she said the part that really killed me: “You need to think about the message you are sending here.”

The message I had sent, or so I thought, was, “I care enough about your kids to spend a day running around gathering supplies to make a cute and time consuming re-purposing project.” But people being the contrary types who like to assume the worst read something else into it, what, I don’t know exactly. “Hey kids, pyromania is fun!” “Crack is cool!” Empty matchboxes are the gateway craft, y’all. (more…)

Them cookies are serious business, people.

One of the reasons many vets give for choosing their profession is, “I like animals better than people.” It’s not a good reason, mind you, and those with misanthropic tendencies learn to cover it up pretty quickly or else have a rotten career, but I will tell you from experience that well, it’s true.

I’ve been working on it. I actually get along pretty well with people, as far as I can tell. But every once in a while I experience one of those penultimate human experiences that I’m supposed to relish, and all I can do is run away screaming and bury my face in the dog and not want to talk to another person for at least eight hours, possibly ten. I had one of those this week.

In an attempt to raise a good citizen, I enrolled my daughter in Girl Scouts. I did it when I was a kid. I tried to find my picture of me in my Brownies uniform to prove it, but I think it’s in the storage facility somewhere, at least that is my excuse. Anyway, as far as I could recall, it was fun: we made some ribbon barrettes, colored, got to wear those badass brown sashes to school and strut around every Tuesday, and I think one time I sold some Thin Mints. It was low key.

And I look around at the second graders these days dressing like Miley Cyrus and singing all the words to “I’m Sexy and I Know It”, and I realized something with horror: I’m apparently an old school prude. And I’m really not, but compared to what’s out there, I kind of am. And I had two main choices for after school activities for my daughter: Girl Scouts or the local dance studio, and if you saw what the eight year olds were wearing at the last recital you would understand why I went with the scouts.

Because the Scouts are the answer to all the things we bemoan about being a woman today, right? It’s about teamwork and solidarity. It’s about empowerment. Equality. Buoying your fellow woman instead of throwing her under the bus. Girl power and all of that, embrace your brain, etc.

Well. (more…)

I’m only *kind of* violent

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been particularly sensitive to depictions of violence against animals. My mother learned early on that I couldn’t handle Tom and Jerry, the Roadrunner cartoons, or Sylvester and Tweety. “But he’s a carnivore!” I would cry sympathetically. “He’s just hungry! Turn on the Snorks, Mom.” And that holds to this day.

But apparently I was much less bothered by anything involving humans wailing on each other. Shortly after graduating vet school, my husband bought an XBox. After four long years of labor and toil, I needed a little decompression, and one day I turned on a game called Morrowind. For several months, I would grab my longsword, beat other characters over the head, and steal all their stuff. I was heady with my virtual strength, pillaging and intimidating my way through the lands. It was fantastic.  (more…)

I swear we have better toys here

My daughter had her first sleepover this weekend.

It was a long time coming. Her very best friend, a girl she has known since kindergarten, is near impossible to arrange any sorts of playdates with. Her mom works full time. Her dad, a retired police sergeant, is busy running the older son around to after school activities but has a rule that the daughter cannot have playdates without her mom or dad there.

Given this statute, let’s just say I didn’t even bother pursuing a sleepover with her. I’m sure we wouldn’t pass a background check.

Anyway, we have other options. We have family friends who have a lovely daughter a year older than mine, and they have known each other for years. They are a little less picky about where they leave their kid, apparently, even going so far as to trust ME of all people with her. Fortunately for me. My daughter was delighted.

I had all sorts of activities set up- movies, popcorn, fashion shows, crafts, I don’t know, all that giggly stuff little girls do. But this little girl doesn’t have a dog, so of course Brody was the center of attention. Not that he minded.

Aside went the crafts, the popcorn, and the Barbie movie, all in favor of giving Brody some much craved attention and love. He was eating it up. He was eating everything up, including this girl’s pillow pet, her burrito, and some kettle corn. They are getting a dog next month. I consider this a valuable learning experience for her about living with a canine. I hope she realizes the value of that, someday.

.

Anyway, I heard them upstairs giggling and laughing and Brody tromping around. Then a squeal, and down the girls come, flying down the stairs. They had been playing tug-of-war with Brody. He has lots of toys laying about for this purpose, but in the interest of some semblance of order, I guess someone had put them away. So he improvised.

It took the girls a few minutes before they realized they were playing tug-of-war with a pair of underpants he retrieved from a hamper. Oh, dear god. At least it wasn’t the cop’s kid who was over. I would probably be in jail.

So if they are reading this, I swear, we do have actual dog toys around here and I don’t force them to use soiled undergarments for lack of better options. Promise. Please let your daughter come over again. She was lovely.

Merry Christmas, kids. I poisoned the dogs.

Let me preface this by saying it isn’t Christmas in my house until it looks like an elf exploded in the foyer. It doesn’t excuse what happened, but it’s important to the story.

On Saturday, my husband and I went out to dinner while the kids spent the night at the grandparents’ house. Before we left, I surveyed the mess that is “middle of Christmas prep” with some trepidation. There was trouble everywhere. Breakable ornaments, garland, boxes piled to the ceiling. Most of it is pretty innocuous, but tasty red wax candles can be messy, so I put them up high. Not seeing anything amiss, we left.

We came back several hours later. Someone had shredded a construction paper Christmas stocking. Oh well.

Then I looked more closely. My laptop bag, which normally lives in the hall closet but had been pulled out along with everything else, was tipped on its side like the crime victim it had become. Its contents spread over the floor like entrails.

I examined the evidence: a name badge, a Hilton key, a Newsweek. All chewed. No biggie.

Then I saw it: a gum wrapper.

Oh, !@$!@$.

I don’t normally chew gum, but my ears were bugging me so I grabbed a pack at the newsstand before my flight on the way out to Kansas. I have no idea what kind it was, even. It is possible it could contain xylitol. Xylitol, the toxic substance I had posted about not one week prior as a Really Bad Thing for dogs.  I had no way of verifying its presence in this particular gum, as the packaging was no longer in existence. I don’t know how much was left in the pack, either.

In the chaos that was the afternoon, the hall closet had been emptied out. The laptop bag which normally lives there was out on the floor, hiding along with all the other stuff that’s normally tucked away. I didn’t even remember that it was out, or that I had once placed gum in it.

All I knew was that my dogs ingested an unknown amount of what might possibly be a xylitol containing substance, and one of the last things I had read before we departed that night was a story about a Great Dane who died of xylitol poisoning. So I panicked. Fortunately the dogs still looked fine, but hypoglycemia can strike out of nowhere, and for all the raving I do to my kids about not leaving grapes laying around, I just couldn’t fathom explaining that Mom accidentally poisoned the dogs two weeks before Christmas.

This is how I wound up out in the cold at midnight making my two indignant dogs throw up. Neither one vomited a gum wrapper. After watching me perform this with some distaste, my husband retired for the night, leaving me downstairs with two nauseated dogs and a pile of guilt bigger than the stack of boxes. So I went to Level Two.

I don’t know if you’ve ever administered activated charcoal to two less than thrilled dogs while you’re shivering and under the influence of a few glasses of pinot, but let me tell you, it’s not fun. Lesson learned.

Then I had to go to bed, but I couldn’t sleep wondering if I had killed one or both of them, so I woke up every hour to check on them. Have you ever done the “Are you dead?” poke on a sleeping dog? They don’t appreciate it. Brody woke up right away, but Koa snores and passes out like a zombie on a normal day, so each time she woke up with a confused “You again? What the heck? I’m fine, really. Stop poking me.”

They got full physical exams on the hour until sunlight, at which time all three of us got up, exhausted but physically fine.

My point is this: everyone makes mistakes, myself included. The vision of me chasing the dogs around the backyard with a bottle of Toxiban at midnight on a Saturday is only funny because it, thankfully, turned out fine. But man, that was not a pleasant reckoning for any of us. It’s stories like this that make me very sympathetic to owners who feel they need to apologize for being human when they have an incident like this- but it’s life. Mistakes happen to all of us.

I’m sure there are those out there who are perfect and never do stuff like this, and to them I say: congratulations. You are clearly handling life with a bunch of kids and dogs with more grace than the rest of us. Now go on and be perfect somewhere else and let the rest of us commiserate about the stupid things we have done and learn from them.

From now on, it’s Juicy Fruit for me. This beats the time Emmett ate a box of truffles on Christmas night with the same result. What’s the worst thing your pet has eaten?

Everyone’s a cynic

“Come to my store!” exalted my daughter, pulling me up the stairs. I obliged, wondering which of my possessions she was going to try to sell back to me this time. That one has always been possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit.

” I have bracelets,” she said, gesturing to an array of beaded items she had crafted using the bead kit she got for her birthday. “And neck-a-laces,” picking up a pair of Mardi Gras beads she inherited at some point.

I picked up a bracelet. “How much?” I asked.

“5 cents,” she replied.

“I think you should up your price structure,” I told her. “To at least a quarter.”

“OK,” she said, taking my quarter and depositing it into a paper bag.

“What does that say?” I asked, squinting at her writing.

“Money for the pet store animals,” she said.

“You mean shelter?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to donate all the money to a shelter.”

And oh, when she said that, my heart melted into a million little pieces and I realized I could die happy. I’ve never instructed her to fundraise, not for pets or for anything, really, so to see her do all of this out of the goodness of her heart just made my Grinchy heart swell two sizes.

“I have twelve dollars so far,” she said.  Apparently before coming to me she had shaken down my husband, my son, and both sets of grandparents.

I gave her a dollar. ”Thanks,” she said, pocketing the dollar. Then she eyed me furtively. “You ARE letting Santa know I’m doing this, right?”

Ah. It all makes sense now.

In the corner, Brody eyed all of this while chewing on a 50 cent bracelet. Despite his proclivity for naughtiness, at least he is pure of heart in his intentions. Nuaghty, nice, or somewhere in between, whatever he engages in, it’s with the most direct of intentions. I wonder if Santa cares about intent.

Faith in humanity, restored

Among one’s many obligations as parent to a school-aged child is that most universal of school experiences, chaperoning a school field trip. My number got called this week, when my second grader’s class went to the zoo. She of course volunteered me, assuming- correctly- that this was the sort of thing I was up for (as opposed to the kindergarten trip to Sea World), and for the most part I was happy to do it.

Until I heard it was going to be raining.

Now, laugh all you want, but we San Diegans are not used to anything that isn’t sunny and 70 degrees. We have thin blood and a certain fear of atmospheric precipitation that borders on Wicked-Witch level paranoia. As soon as we heard it was going to be raining, the e-mails started to fly:

“Are they cancelling the trip?”

“No! And I can’t imagine why! This will be disastrous!”

It was with this sort of apprehension that I arrived, with an umbrella and a cup of liquid courage in the form of a Gingerbread latte, to commence duties as kid-wrangler.

There they stood, running in circles like puppies at doggie day care, yelping, whining, waving umbrellas at each others’ faces like pointy ended spherical light sabers. And I was supposed to keep them from getting hurt, lost, or injured. All off-leash.

The troubles began quickly. “I’m cold,” said a small girl in shorts. She had taken off her jacket and tied it around her hips, sarong-style, to protect her legs from the biting 60 degree winds, leaving her torso exposed to the elements. In addition to forgetting to check the weather report in advance of this blizzard, she had also neglected to bring an umbrella.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, because it was kind of cold. But commiseration was all I had to offer.

I had grand ideas of sharing with them the wonders we were seeing, the Maasai giraffes and the incredibly endangered black rhinos I spent hours searching for on the other side of the world, served up to them within mere feet of their little hands. “Aren’t they beautiful?” I asked the boy next to me, who stopped picking his nose long enough to stare at me blankly. “When’s lunch?” he asked.

“I’m cold,” said the cold girl again.

And so it continued, the herd shuffling and shivering through the zoo like a bunch of Chinese Cresteds without our requisite cold weather gear, soggy, crabby, and hungry. Somewhere along the way Cold Girl had buddied up with a kid who had an umbrella large enough to share, so she at least got to stay somewhat dry. I stayed towards the back, herding the errant outliers back to the main herd so they wouldn’t be picked off by predatory tour buses.

At lunchtime, we found a relatively dry spot and plunked down to eat. Cold Girl tugged on my sleeve.

“I don’t have a lunch,” she informed me. “And I’m starving.”

I looked through my bag, pulling out an old packet of cheese crackers and a granola bar, the only food I had to offer. She took them morosely.

I wandered off to find the teacher, hoping they might have sent along an extra lunch or two for such emergencies, but of course the school had not. I came back to my table, planning on making an unapproved run to the concession stand to buy her something- which was sure to cause much angst amongst the rest of the kids- only to find her happily chowing down on a huge pile of food.

With no prompting, the rest of her class had taken it upon themselves to divvy up their own lunches to provide for their friend. Sure, the selection was heavy on the fruit and light on the chips, but those soggy little primates had decided to embrace the concept of community and take care of one of their own. I’ve seen wild chimps take in orphans but also abandon the weak and sickly, so I really had no predictions as to which direction this would go.

Hence the title of the post.

Don’t leave the vet in charge

I have a new Baking With Brody post ready to go that just needs a couple more pictures. I’ll have it up this weekend, just in time for Halloween. So in the meantime, a corollary to yesterday’s post:

One of my tasks as kindergarten room mom, a job I grudgingly agreed to despite my better judgment, is to decorate the booth at the kid’s Halloween carnival. I thought we would be provided with games and we would simply be in charge of manning it, but oh, no, we need to actually come up with an activity ourselves, and then execute it. Under a pop up tent we were in charge of procuring, decorating, setting up, and taking down.

I panicked, being one who does neither creative games nor camping. So I consulted my friend, the Brownie troop leader, who despite her always on top of things demeanor never manages to make me feel like the slacker I am.

“We did something great last year,” she said. “You make a coffin with different things in it and let the kids put their hands in it and guess what they are feeling. Like, grapes for eyeballs, spaghetti for intestines, that sort of thing.”

And that could work, but I figured hey, why not up the ante and make it a real house of horrors?

I thought of the things I could bring in from work:

• Brody’s testicles (I kept them. So sue me.)
• A glaucomatous eyeball I enucleated in a bloody surgery worthy of Wes Craven;
• a tapeworm
• A jar of ticks
• Pictures of heartworm disease

Underachieving Moms Club

I am possessed of the vague and disquieting sense of disease that comes from knowing you are incredibly behind in everything you are supposed to be doing.

Case in point: I promised my kids a month ago I would make them banana bread. I’ve tried three times, and every time I go to do it someone has eaten the bananas below the requisite number needed to make said bread. So they have been eating the Frankenberry cereal that one of the grandparents bought when we were in Africa for the past three days, a sickly, pink concoction that I keep hoping they don’t admit to anyone at school was their mom’s idea of a balanced breakfast.

I said a week ago that Brody was stinky and needed a bath. He still hasn’t gotten one. I bought the shampoo but I haven’t figured out how to get around the fact that my shower hose attachment is missing. It confounds me.

We’re behind on reading and spelling homework, behind on grocery shopping, behind on the 10 blog posts I’m supposed to be working on, and don’t even get me started on laundry.

It was in this state of mind that I arrived at the grocery store after dropping the kids off at school, when I heard a voice chirp my name from behind me at the Starbucks kiosk. It was the PTA Vice-President.

“Oh, are you volunteering this morning?” she asked. I looked around. I was indeed at the grocery store, not at school, but she asked it with such certainty that I realized that for her, you either went to work, or you volunteered at school.

“Um, no, just heading home,” I said.

“Ah, it’s so nice to have a day off,” she said. “I love being able to get the house clean.”

I nodded vaguely.

“And cook for the family.”

I covered the fishsticks in the cart with my purse. Technically that counts, right?

So it was that I took my non-volunteering butt home, walked past the piled up dishes, plunked down on the couch and motioned for my smelly mess of a dog to get up on it with me while I tried to finish a couple of things on the computer. Oh, who am I kidding. I was on Facebook. I was doing several things, none of which involved baking, cleaning, or being productive.

I say all of this because I ran into another mother this afternoon, who was having a similar crisis of conscience. “I don’t know how these women do it all,” she said. “How do you?”

I answered truthfully. “I don’t.”

I watched my kids egress their classroom, with hair in need of a trim and homework that had probably been done incorrectly, and walked back home to my wreck of a house and stinky canines. I wallowed in my mediocrity as I tried to reconcile my advanced degree with the fact that I don’t get New Math. I decided that the PTA moms are secretly popping Xanax and Adderall in the janitorial closet because it’s the only possible explanation for their overabundant energy and dedication to jazzercise at 5:30 AM.

“I’m sorry you’ve been eating pink cardboard for breakfast for three days,” I said to my kids.

“I like the marshmallows,” said my son.

“I’m sorry you are still a stinkbomb,” I said to Brody.

He licked me.

I don’t have all of anything. But I have a little of everything, and that’s enough.

That’s my Girl

Last week, my daughter’s Girl Scout troop was decorating t-shirts for Halloween. Now, ever since we’ve gotten back from Africa the only thing my little Jane Goodall can talk about is all the animals we saw, and when can we go on another safari, and can she please come. She even made me a picture book of drawings of all the animals we showed her. She was not even scared when I told her we came across a giraffe that had been eaten by a lion on the side of the road. She is, for sure, my kid.

Anyway, they were doing some tie-dye shirts and stencilling them with Halloween decorations. We have a great leader. She more than makes up for our troop’s utterly useless co-leader (that would be me.) She did all the work and I just kind of watched, in awe, as she expertly bedazzled 14 picky kids’ shirts.

She put eyeballs on pumpkins. She put earrings on skeletons. And then, she nodded somberly at my daughter’s request, and as I looked on in amused approval, she put two eyes on one zombie giraffe.

The place we were staying at Tarangire, by the way, was crawling with fruit bats, so this is top to bottom a perfectly authentic African Halloween t-shirt. Right down to the colors.

I might ask her to make one for me next.

We all have our talents

I volunteer in my kids’ classrooms on a quasi-regular basis. I do it because they need the help, not because I have a great deal to contribute to the average 5 year old. Yes, even now, they still scare me.

The first time I went in, the kindergarten teacher had several tasks for me to choose from. One, pull a bunch of papers out of some books and then sort them. Admin stuff.

Two, call the kids back one by one to work on writing their names. Uh oh. Interactive stuff. I never know what to do with other people’s kids in these situations. It usually goes like:

“OK Gavin, let’s start with G….what? Pop Tarts? That’s nice. OK, G….huh? Shoelace? OK…don’t you have Velcro?…OK, let’s try an ‘a’….oh, that’s really gross, kid…” (starts looking at clock)

And then option 3, which was a pile of birthday crowns that needed to be traced and cut. A ha. A manual dexterity task. I’m all over it.

So an hour later, she had a pile of the most surgically precise construction paper crowns that ever existed outside a paper mill. They were perfect. I even made sure they were equally distributed amongst the color selections. If only I had my electrocautery, those babies would have been off the hook.

The next time I went in, there were two tasks to choose from: Pulling papers out of books, or tracing teddy bears. An hour later, an army of Borg-like bears was piled on the desk, perfectly round ears and precisely sharp limb joints ready to be mutilated by the kids.

This last time I went in, there was simply a pile of gingerbread men to be meticulously brought to fruition. This teacher is pretty smart.

Born to Be Wild: finally getting a movie right!

You all remember the Tyrannosaur movie debacle? It’s taken me all this time to work up enough nerve to go to another science museum movie after leaving the theater with two howling kids in tow. In the interim, we went to see Disney’s African Cats, which was another hot mess (“Mommy, why are all the kittens dead?” etc) and didn’t help my opinion of modern nature documentaries.

When I was reading all the sad reviews of African Cats, dubbing it “most depressing nature film ever made” and that sort of thing, I kept hearing that “Born to be Wild” was a much better nature movie that came out about the same time. I made a mental note that I might like to see that one someday.

I recently replaced my Natural History Museum membership with one to the Science Museum, and they have an IMAX theater. I noticed when I got the new membership that Born to Be Wild was one of the movies playing at the Science Museum Theater. So today, with the start of school literally just around the corner, I decided to take a calculated risk and go see the movie with the kids.

(more…)