Miss Molly

Is she not gorgeous?

I got to spend a lot of time with my baby yesterday. She sometimes gets a bit overlooked with the hustle and bustle of every day life. But no dog ever seems to be happy with the amount of attention they receive. Molly could never play enough and then when you tell her to go lay down she looks at you like you're the worst person on earth. So then she wants to back her ass up and sit on you. If she could climb into my husband I think she would, kinda like that scene from 'Empire Strikes Back' where Luke gets stuffed into that hairy thing to stay warm.



See what I mean? Oh, but she's really not on the couch because one paw is still on the ground.



 Molly's not a little lap dog. She thinks she is. Her mom is a boxer and her dad was a Great Dane (poor Scooby passed away this year). Belle and Scooby were "brother" and "sister," living under the same roof, and they just couldn't keep 160 pound Scooby away from Belle when it was her special time. So Molly was a product of their "love." We brought her home when she was 6 weeks old. She is now almost 6 years old and weighs 90 pounds. She loves to back up and sit on you, like you don't notice. Before you know it, her paws are in your lap and then her head is on your shoulder.  If only your chest wasn't constricted ('Money Pit' reference) and you could breathe, things would be fine.



Molly's been quite a handful since she came into our lives. She missed her litter mates terribly and cried forever the first few days she was home. Then, when she was not even 2 months old, she pulled the sock off my 4 year old niece's foot and swallowed it. A trip to the vet to get her to throw it up cost us $100. Would you believe exactly 2 weeks later she did it again? This time she found one of my son's socks in the couch. I had attempted to teach her the "drop it!" command. This just made her swallow the sock quicker to then inhale all of the treats on the floor! After another $100 trip to the vet, she lived quite a long time on a leash. She just dragged it everywhere she went and if she was about to do something wrong we could stop her with a step on the leash.




 

She's mellowed out just a bit since getting older. We now leave NO socks laying around and she always has plenty of toys to choose from. Her favorite things? Molly knows the sound of an empty peanut butter jar from a mile away. With her unusually long tongue (seriously, we're talking giving Gene Simmons a run for his money here), she cleans out that jar in a heart beat. She also sits in front of you while you're eating yogurt, drooling, until you give her the empty container to clean out. Molly can shake your hand and give you a high five for a treat. She's incredibly smart and asinine all at the same time.



Last year, she had a cyst on her tail rupture and I swear she was going to hemorrhage. My son woke us up after seeing all of the blood in the hallway. It was a frigging crime scene. She would wag her tail and blood would be splayed on the walls and cabinets like a Jackson Pollock painting. The drive to the vet at 2am was pure fun. There's my husband in the back of the van trying to keep a towel wrapped around her tail, while Molly, terrified of car trips, jumped from seat to seat.

This was just the bloodbath in the kitchen!

Can you sense the humiliation? She's saying "You're gonna put this on Facebook, aren't you?"





 That visit, with the surgery and aftercare, cost us $1,500. She came home with the dreaded cone of shame. Thankfully the cyst wasn't cancerous and she healed well.


 

Of course the bandage fell off after only an hour or two at home!

ANYWAY, yesterday I spent the day giving Molly a bath to rid her of her fleas. It was unseasonably warm, so it wasn't that torturous for her. She's just too big to put in the bathtub and I'm not taking her in the car by myself to get her groomed! I made sure I had plenty of pitchers of warm water on hand to warm her up after the sudsing. Then I had to struggle with her to put on her new flea collar. After that, I had to clean out her "house" (it's a ginormous crate that takes up like 1/4 of my daughter's room), spray it with flea spray, put in new bedding, vacuum the living room and spray it down. Hopefully that's the end of them. If not, it's time to bring out the big guns and the bombs. All in all I think Molly enjoyed her spa day.



Lounging in the sun after her day of beauty.