#105, puppy sleep train summer

Meet my fourth child, Tayto O’Keefe. I do have the right to refer to him as my son because he has made me more slightly insane and tired than any time since I had a baby. Kevin is like “We are not his parents” and I say “Oh Tayto, isn’t Dad, who is your biological father, so silly.”

FWIW Eileen also refers to him as her “little brother” and has said a bunch of times that she’s happy not to be the youngest anymore and that the number of boys and girls in our house is now even. But she also gets genuinely upset that Tayto “gets to” “go to bed” (be put into the crate after falling asleep on the couch) later than her “even though he’s zero years old.”

Tayto’s pre-adoption name was Zamboni and he was one of 12 puppies in the litter. Ten of them were black, and he and one other were brindle. Choosing him partly (largely) based on his beautiful fur colors felt problematic. But the good news is that all of them have been adopted! His mom was a lab (the rescue claims) and his father is an unknown scoundrel. The craziest thing I learned (from my friend Emily) is that puppies born in the same litter can ~and often do~ have different dads.

It’s called superfecundation! Nobody believes this when you first tell them. But it’s true!! “There are no limits.” It could be 12 dads! (“While the puppies may have different dads, each individual puppy will only have one father.”)

Alice asked me to stop randomly telling people this fact. “It’s embarrassing.”

When we picked Tayto up from the foster mom’s house, he was there with two of his siblings, who were also getting picked up that day. I asked the foster mom if he would miss them and she said no, it can be bad to adopt two puppies from the same litter because of something called littermate syndrome. (“One of the hardest things about owning littermates is the ‘waterfall’ descent as the dogs reach adolescence.”) There is a literally endless list of fascinating and insane things to learn about dogs and it’s crazy to think I didn’t give a shit about any of it until a couple months ago. Some people say littermate syndrome is a myth. I did feel pretty comfortable saying no though when Eileen asked if Tayto missed his mom. “No, we are his family now.”

“But why doesn’t he miss her?”

“He doesn’t remember her.”

r/puppy101 is full of people who don’t have kids getting their first puppy and being hit with the same thing that happens when you have a baby: You’ll never be free again and you did it to yourself! It’s called “puppy blues.” I had a few days of it when we first brought him home and it felt deeply familiar. You know, simultaneously being teary and overwhelmed about how hard things suddenly are, escaping from the puppy for a 10-minute errand to pick up pizza, getting to the pizza place and while you’re waiting looking at pictures of the puppy and wondering if there’s any little treat I could buy him while I’m out.

On the other hand, there are many things about puppies that are not at all comparable with things about babies. Like when I picked him up from his first day of Puppy Social at Crate Escape and the person at the door said, “Are you Tayto’s mom? YOU’RE NOT GETTING HIM BACK!” I LOVE to imagine the daycare director saying this when you pick up your 12-week-old on their first day.

Human daycares also don’t post babies’ names and faces on Instagram but it was the high point of my month that Tayto got both a post and a story. Nobody asked my permission, but once it happened I just wanted 20somethings to make more and more content about him.

His favorite treat is bully sticks. Those are bull penises. Look at the back of the bag and it’ll say Ingredients: Bull Pizzle. Their price has skyrocketed along with the price of beef generally, so Tayto gets like the equivalent of a coffee shop cold brew every single day, meanwhile look at Kevin and me making our cold brew at home and wondering if we can reuse the grounds.

Do NOT Google a picture of bully sticks before processing.

Or you can get a $16.99 bully braid, which is three dicks braided together. The longest ones you can buy from reputable outlets are about 12 inches long. We were in an Ocean State Job Lot and they were selling 24-inch bully sticks by the counter, but those have got to be glued.

I also got him a $20 bully stick holder, which keeps his precious self safe from choking on the final inch.

Last thing for now, his first week I thought he ate one of Eileen’s letter magnets. We took him to the emergency vet, a venture capital joint with a gigantic sparkling waiting room, a Keurig, and free poop bag dispensers. In the room we were put in, there was a gigantic black and white wall hanging of a hot young tattooed alternative girl vet cuddling a bulldog.

I told the hot young vet that I thought he ate a magnet. She said, “Do you know which letter it was, by chance?” They had to make him throw up. While we were waiting for that to happen, she brought me the bill on an iPad and said, “Let me know if you see any wrong with it because that would be my bad!”

The bill was $700 and pet insurance, which is like pre-Obamacare insurance with a waiting period, had not yet kicked in. I imagined being like “Oh ummmmm sorry, I do see something wrong with this, it’s $700???”

He threw up a bunch and guess what, he hadn’t eaten a magnet after all!