You know how you can hold a small dog with their back against you like a baby, or cradled in your arm like a baby? Well, we could do that with Kylie and then hold things out to her and she would hold them in her hands. The best example was a q-tip, and I have no idea how we figured this out or why we did it the first time but it was amazing! She would hold one end of the q-tip between her paw/hands and bring the other end to her mouth and chomp on it then take it back out of her mouth and look at it.

You could even throw her ball to her like that and she would catch it – not in her mouth, with her hands! Then she would bring it to her mouth IN her hands! Just crazy, and so funny!

That was especially true on a spontaneous jaunt to Roswell, New Mexico where Kylie made some interesting new friends.

Anyway, as you can imagine the drive got very boring, miles and miles and miles of nothing (actually you can’t imagine). Kylie doesn’t do well with boring.. fortunately her imagination kept her from staying that way. She invented a game.

She was riding in the back of a little Honda Civic hatchback and she started putting her paws up on the back of the driver’s seat so she could see out the front, and she would wait… Then when there would be an oncoming vehicle, she would get ready – ready to attack! Growling, and posturing, she would get louder as they got closer, then as they sped past she barked visciously and pounced against the backseat window and “chase” them all the way to the back of the car, feverishly jumping on and climbing over the bags and pillows and what not in the hatchback, and barking at them behind us for awhile! She went nuts!! Then she’d “reset” and come back to the front wagging her tail, waiting for the next one.

This went on for hours, although she would skip some cars for no apparent reason. Well, no apparent reason to us anyway, clearly the game had rules we did not understand. We tried joining in a couple times but mostly we didn’t do it right and she would look at is like we were the crazy ones!

It certainly made a boring drive entertaining, just like Kylie made every boring day entertaining!

We miss that noisy little dog so much!

The worst ever for Kylie.. the lobster. Have you ever seen a dog looking really pi$&ed off?!

..she was not amused.

The best ever, for everyone.. The Queen of Cool!

She left this get-up on for two parties without protest, it was weird. We decided that she must have decided this what what she was always meant to wear.. after all, she really is The Queen of Cool!

And don’t worry, Kylie may have thought we were playing tricks on her, but there were always treats too!

We took her to a nice farmer’s market in the garden state and we got some big pumpkins for carving and let Kylie pick out a little one for herself.  Then we gave it to her to do whatever she wanted. She would push it around, gnaw on the stem,  then bite it! She would spend a few minutes or a few hours over a few days or weeks chewing chunks out of the pumpkin and spitting them out. It made a big mess but it was fun for her, and she never ate it so obviously she was carving it!

So from the age of two she got her own little pumpkin to carve every year about this time.

It was a very important part of Halloween until just a few years ago when she apparently just outgrew the whole thing and showed no interest in her pumpkin. You know how teenagers are! But we kind of missed having her make a big orange mess all over the house.. now we really miss it.

We were there because our friend and former neighbor,  Kelly, was visiting us from Jersey. (Kelly used to call Kylie her “little meatloaf”) She had requested that instead of the normal touristy stuff during her visit to Colorado, we do ABnormal touristy stuff – you know, roadside oddities and the like. Well that’s right up our alley so went to among other odd things along the roadside, The Colorado Gator Farm. It was quite a drive and quite a surprise when we got there to see a sign on the door that said “Dogs Allowed.” (And this was one of the few places we weren’t going to complain about not being able to take her.)

Kylie very much enjoyed the Gator Farm & Reptile Park..

Yes that’s a real (real big) alligator just on the other side of the fence, and Yes, she’s barking at him!!

We called her gator bait for the rest of the week!

But for Kylie’s second christmas photo we bought her a Santa suit – her first christmas she was a Tropical Raindog (it was hawaii.. get it?).

It was a really high quality Santa suit, thick red plush with fuzzy white collar and a broad black belt. She looked quite jolly wearing it! And apparently it made her jolly because when we would take it off she would pick it up, drag it to the middle of the floor and roll around on it until you would put it back on her. She wore a Santa suit for six months! And it was hawaii.. it was hot!

So we started buying her toddler tees and tank tops because like I said, dog clothes were hard to come by, especially in hawaii. She really liked it wearing clothes – we liked it too, we just thought it was weird!

Then when we moved to the mainland and she got her first exposure to canine couture she built up quite the wardrobe.

Funny thing was, after living there for awhile, like a “real dog” chasing squirrels, seeing other dogs out and about, it’s like she realized that she was in fact a dog and dogs did not wear clothes. So she began the occasional protest when we would put cute stuff on her. You could get her to cooperate while you dressed her, but then she would just stand perfectly still.

When she wanted to play in the snow, she was much more tolerant – it was like she understood that it would keep her warm for awhile.

In fact, she liked the snow so much, she would even put up with this…

It was worth it for her.. Kylie loved the snow! And of course we loved putting her in cute stuff, and she looked so adorable in them, so we continued to buy her the latest fashions.

Kylie did like the compliments and attention she got when she was all dressed up, so she was willing to compromise. She was mature like that!

Our best road trips were to visit them in Anaheim, and as soon as we arrived she became a different dog. She was so sweet and docile and well behaved… it was weird. We would go gallivanting with our friends and Kylie would stay at the house with her grandparents. She would sit between them on a lay-z-boy and let them spoil her rotten. She would follow them around, go on walks around the neighborhood, being friendly to neighborhood dogs. It didn’t hurt that she got a steady supply of roast beef from her grandma!

After a couple days of that we would ask her, “who are you and what have you done with our punk ass dog?” So we would try and out her. We would get one of the toys she loved to terrorize, we always brought one or two along, and try and get her riled up. It actually only worked once. She suddenly got vicious and pounced on the toy and growled aggressively. Then she suddenly stopped and looked around, and her grandma was shocked, and just as we were about to say, “you see, she’s a mean dog,” her grandma said, “Oh Kylie, are they picking on you? You poor thing.” And Kylie didn’t miss a beat, she played along and went to her like she had been beaten so that she could be comforted with a whole slice of roast beef.

Con Artist!!

The funny thing was that this behavior would go on the whole time we were there, then as soon as the first back pack was in the hatch back, Kylie was in the car and you couldn’t convince her to get out again.

As much as she loved being there, being treated like a princess, she never totally lost that fear of abandonment that shelter dogs always have. She knew if we were loading the car it meant we were leaving and she was not going to be left behind.

Silly girl, like we would ever leave her!

Kylie used to do this every night in the summer in our New Jersey apartment. And the sprinklers didn’t come on until 11 PM!

Anyway, once we moved to the mainland and had thunderstorms to deal with regularly, they didn’t just frighten Kylie, they would send her under the bed for the rest of the day, shaking and cowering. It was heartbreaking and absolutely nothing would console her, until…

One day, I don’t know how we got the idea, but during a particularly thunderous thunder storm we started encouraging her to BARK back at the thunder. And she did! Meekly at first, but with encouragement she got braver and of course louder! And louder, and louder, and louder, barking, howling, and carrying on like a lunatic!! All the while we would cheer her on and she loved it, and we loved seeing her brave and empowered instead of terrified. Knowing that thunderstorms are a common fear for dogs, we thought we should do an infomercial or something about how to empower your pooch, and get rich.

Then we went on vacation to hawaii – the only place we went on vacation without Kylie – and a friend of ours stayed at our house to take care of Kylie. One day when we called to see how they were doing, the friend who sounded very tired told us they were fine but there had been a series of storms the night before, in the middle of the night, and well therefore she was pretty tired at work that day.

“Oops, sorry about that,” we apologized. We felt a little guilty, but we explained our motivation for encouraging the foul-weather ferociousness. Fortunately there weren’t any more stormy nights during our trip and we brought our friend a large quantity of macadamia nuts and all was forgiven!

We of course continued to instigate the insanity, especially in colorado where thunder comes almost daily from late May to early July.

Kylie!!

That hand-puppet was the best purchase from a dollar store ever!