Ok, so in Monday’s post I may not have given Lemmy the credit he deserves.  It wasn’t until I started looking through his old puppy photos that I realized how utterly ridiculous Mom and Dad were as first time dog owners.  No wonder Lemmy acted odd on my first day!  My homecoming probably reminded him of the things he had to endure his first week home alone with two overzealous helicopter dog parents!  This also explains why he was always emailing his Momma Butter for advice.  Lemmy certainly had a lot of work to do training Mom and Dad.  In fact, Asa and I owe a great deal of gratitude to Lemmy for taking charge and molding them into the upstanding but quirky parents that they are today.  Seriously, these old photos reveal they were absolutely clueless when it came to taking care of a puppy.

For example, take this innocent looking picture of Lemmy on a Winnie the Pooh blanket.  Now let me explain Mom’s rationale for the blanket.  She thought Lemmy would get cold sitting on the tile, so she gave him a blanket to play on.  Well it didn’t take long for Lemmy to make it a blanket to play with!  He would happily chew it and drag it around the kitchen, then wonder why Mom kept taking it away.  Talk about a mixed message!

And speaking of the kitchen, this photo had me really confused at first.  Why was Lemmy trapped behind boxes?  That is until Mom revealed they didn’t always have the gate to block off the living room, and they wanted to contain Lemmy to the kitchen until he was housebroken.  In a misguided attempt to block his access, Dad had the brilliant idea of making a wall of boxes.  Lemmy of course made it his mission to breach that wall, and based on the stories he was successful more often than not.

When he did go outside I couldn’t help but notice in every picture taken in the backyard he was attached to Mom or Dad on a leash.  The poor guy never had a moment alone!  I can understand if they were outside the fence area, but you can clearly see in the background it was there.  Why was he always leashed?  Well that was Dad’s fault.  You see he built the fence, and knew in a couple of spots it didn’t line up properly and tiny Lemmy could fit through.  So they kept him leashed.  Mind you they never let him out of their sight.  So he never even had a chance to escape even if he wanted to.  But do you know who they didn’t always watch?  Me!  When I was a puppy I chased a leaf blowing in the wind right through one of those weak points!  But Mom was too busy coddling Lemmy to notice my escape.  Thank goodness I was smart enough to figure out how to get back in the yard on my own.

Now considering Lemmy was always leashed, this next mishap is quite perplexing.  They took him for his first walk in the woods, and he came back covered in pine sap.  If he was leashed, I’m not sure how that even happened.  But what did they do?  To remove the pine sap they covered the poor dog in peanut butter!  Thus triggering his lifelong peanut butter addiction.  Ok, so perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.

But what was a bad thing is this peanut butter addiction spiraled into another odd quirk that can be directly tied to his first week home.  His insistence that someone hold his bone for him when he chewed it.  You see, like all puppies, he had trouble holding his bone with his big floppy paws, and his coordination was that of a drunkard.  So in true helicopter dog parent style, they  started holding it for him!  Something he never out grew!  Do you know how embarrassing it was when we had visitors over and as an adult he would carry his bone over to them and insist they hold it for him?  Talk about lazy!

Then apparently sometime during that first week home, Mom and Dad got really overconfident and decided that training was so easy that even a Monkey could do it.  Or in this case two Monkeys.  Seriously, the book they are reading is Golden Retrievers for Dummies!  That would certainly explain a few of Lemmy’s quirks if he was raised by Monkeys.  Then again, he may have been better off with the Monkeys!

By the end of the week Lemmy couldn’t take Mom and Dad’s ridiculousness any longer, and decided to take matters into his own paws.  In fact, here is a photo of the precise moment when Lemmy realized he was smarter than Mom and Dad and took charge of the situation.

After that the blanket and wall of boxes were no match for him.  It was within a week of his homecoming that Lemmy laid down the ground rules and trained my parents to be the awesome but quirky helicopter dog parents that they are today!  Oh sure they needed some fine-tuning when I arrived, but I’m thankful Asa and I didn’t have to endure the foolish things Mom and Dad did to Lemmy during his first week home!  If you’d like to read more about Mom and Dad’s adventures as first time dog parents, I suggest you read my post Peanut Butter War Paint.