Our Life with Labs is being published with the latest post on top, so if you’d like to start from the beginning, that would be the bottom most post.

Barkley & Gretchen Join our Family

As tax season drew to a close, our first yellow male, Barkley arrived, followed four days later by our first black female, Gretchen. As you can well imagine, chaos erupted! Four Lab pups under the age of six months brought this mother of five to her knees. Outside, the pups were confined to runs and kennels. Indoors, the kitchen and a playpen in my office became their habitat. The outside situation was good, the inside situation, a disaster. Four pups is more than anyone can watch and soon my kitchen cabinets and table and chairs were screaming out for help. In no time at all, there were teeth marks in every piece of wood in my kitchen. My dining room table and chairs were mere shadows of their former selves. One chair had its leg almost entirely eaten off. Now this was not cheap furniture. It was special ordered from a furniture store in Canada, so to watch it being slowly demolished was almost more than I could bare. Enjoying the morning paper with coffee at the kitchen table became a thing of the past, because the moment I would lay the paper down it was in someone’s mouth and being ripped to shreds. I don’t know, I just lost interest in reading soggy, pieced together articles. There was frequently so much missing from the article that I wasn’t sure I was actually getting the point the article was trying to make anyway.

Then there was the debacle in my office. One evening I was working on a tax return and had two of the pups in a playpen in the office with me. The playpen was on one side of the room and my desk was on the other side. Here was my fatal mistake…I got up for a few minutes and went into the house. When I returned, what I saw horrified me. In fact, I still have nightmares about this one. The pups had moved their playpen across the room to my desk and pulled my client’s source documents (original forms) down into their play area. Well, this was like dropping raw meat into a pool filled with piranhas. I salvaged what I could and spent several hours taping forms back together, but some important information had simply been eaten and was not retrievable. Fortunately, the client was one who had been with me for years, and I was able to obtain the information again. At least the pups were kind enough not to pick a brand new client. You have to look on the bright side of things, you know. Labs give new meaning to the age old excuse “the dog ate my homework”. Trust me; it’s happened in our household before.

Needless to say, that little episode ended pups in playpens in my office. Now if a Lab gets to be in my office with me, they are confined to a heavy wire crate, one which they cannot relocate on a whim! Barkley and Gretchen were the culprits in the office caper, so as you can see, they were no easier than the first two.

Spring turned into summer and the Labs grew along with their appetites, curiosity and their reach, thus providing many more episodes of destruction, mayhem and with the right philosophical perspective...humor.

And then there was... Jasmine!

Five weeks after Moogolee joined our family, Jasmine arrived (our first yellow female). Now we had double trouble because Jasmine, also, was a very busy puppy. At the breeder’s, Jasmine seemed a little tentative and laid-back. The moment she walked through our front door her personality changed and the true Jasmine emerged. She declared “Listen up everyone…I’m in charge now”, and from that moment on that is exactly the way it has been. Moogolee understood right away that the top position would never be his and fell right in line behind Jasmine.

Jasmine, at first, seemed like she was not going to be quite as big a handful as “The Moog”, but Moogolee, sensing that this situation might not work out in his favor (I would always know who did it), worked at teaching Jasmine to be a handful, as well. It had always been hard to dress or undress with Moogolee loose in the room because he was going after my pants, my socks, my shoes, anything really, within his reach. So the first night that Jasmine was with us, I get my slippers out and Moogolee (as usual) runs over and grabs one, but this time he doesn’t run off with it, he runs over and plunks it down in front of Jasmine, then comes back grabs my other slipper…and off he goes! Well, from that night on, Jasmine joined in the fun and it took longer and longer to get ready for bed.

During the next two months, we adjusted to life with Labs. The baby gates went back up, outlets were plugged, cords unplugged, sharp and inedible objects were removed from anywhere within their reach, and once again, our house was baby proofed. Tax season was in full swing and my sanity was only saved through the use of crates, exercise pens, and dog runs. 

Moogolee gets bored easily. You can see it in his eyes. He starts walking around the room just eyeing everything…kind of like window shopping. Then he will spot the object of his desire. Now it doesn’t matter whether it’s high, low, near, or far, Moogolee will figure out a way to get to it and make it his own. Pulling my morning newspaper off the table and shredding it was one of his favorite pastimes. He amused himself by chewing off half the cord to our George Foreman grill (Moog clearly thought we were already eating lean enough), removing the molding from our island counter, and whittling down my dining room table and chairs. Jasmine assisted when she wasn’t off on some home improvement project of her own. While I was trying to expand their world giving them larger and larger spaces to explore…they were destroying mine! Clearly, I wasn’t totally “Lab savvy” yet.