Feeding time at our house has always been complicated. But now I’m thrilled to say that in her ninth year, my dog, Diggity, who seemed to be on an IRA-style hunger strike her whole life, has started eating! This mini-golden-doodle, this living breathing teddy bear, has suddenly decided that she loves food. New Year, new pooch.
For many years, we’ve been encouraging her to eat in every way possible. Raw food, cooked food, fast food, you name it. Sure, she would eat occasionally, especially human food, but we had to entice her and it wasn’t her priority. We’d even use our cats as decoys – serving them treats in front of her or near her bowl to make her jealous. Sometimes it would work.
I even tried the airplane game. I’d load some of her food onto a spoon that I and flew around her snout until it safely landed near her mouth. I’d make the airplane noise too. But she didn’t open her mouth. Crash landing on me.
Then, on a foggy San Francisco night, on the kind of day you have soup or chilly or bourbon, we decided to make Diggity’s meal a stew. We put some chicken bouillon powder in a glass of water, microwaved it, and poured it on the child’s food. Instead of her soup becoming a meal (as the people at Campbell’s Soup say) her meal became a soup. (Caveat: until this moment I didn’t know what bouillon was or how it worked. This was my wife’s idea. When she said we can use bouillon, I thought she meant we should pour gold on the food. Which wouldn’t be far-fetched for how we treat Diggity.)
Wouldn’t you know it, when her meal became a soup, Diggity lapped up every bit. Like it was her first real meal. And then she fell asleep.
She’s been joyfully eating every day since. In fact, she looks forward to her meals. Yesterday she talked into my Apple watch and said, “set the timer for five minutes for feeding Diggity.”
Now, she circles her bowl, pre-meal and licks the bowl clean, after. Like a dog! She’s food-motivated and we’re motivated to feed her. No more need for using the cats as props or the food airplane. We’ve stuck the landing.
Chowder Head
One morning, while juggling a zoom call for work and making my dog’s breakfast hurriedly before the dog walker came, which can be a tight dance sometimes, I clumsily spilled the bouillon powder on the counter.
This might have been fine, but my glasses were on the counter. The bouillon went on my reading glasses. I quickly reacted by washing the glasses with hot water, not realizing (because I failed home economics in school and most problem-solving tests since) that I’d turned my glasses into a narrow soup bowl.
I created a soupy film on my glasses that Ron Howard could direct. How do you wash off soup without creating more broth? I’m not sure if that question is rhetorical but it is something to stew over.
In the end, I cleaned the glasses and the dog got fed. Diggity revels in her two meals a day and I see the world through minestrone-colored glasses.
Digity is full of surprises! Minestrone colored Sun Glasses …that’s funny