P’d, More prep – better result

So yesterday was the first day for a new experiment with the dogs.  I had my neighbor from across the street come and let them out once during the day so I wouldn’t have to drive home and back over my lunch hour.  It was a partial success.

The house was feces free but Nicki was unable to hold her bladder.  Luckily the urine was in the kitchen so the ceramic tile made for easy clean up.  My neighbor came over a little early in the day, around 10:30 so that might have been making Nicki hold it just a little too long.

With her thyroid medicine, Nicki drinks a ton of water and as a result has to pee quite often.  Today the neighbor is going to come over closer to noon to see if it works out better.

So as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Nicki had not been doing good with her eating.  She appeared to just be sick of the bland hypo-allergenic food she had been eating for 6 months or more.  Ali started including blanched chicken in Nicki’s meals and it has totally flipped around her attitude towards eating.

Before, when I put down the old stuff Nicki would just lay there and not even bother to go up to the dish most of the time.  Now she is sitting by my side as I prep the meals, dying with anticipation.  She has completely cleaned her plate 3 times, something she hadn’t done for me in months.

Of course this diet change requires more legwork, much more than opening a can and dumping it in a bowl.  I bought a big package of boneless chicken thighs at Sam’s, boiled them and put them in a big container in the fridge.  Before each meal I take a couple pieces out, put it in a small bowl with some water and microwave them for a minute.  Then I take them out, cut them into smaller pieces and insert her pills inside the chicken as well as adding a couple other supplements. This then gets mixed in with a can of dog food, she prefers it to get mixed with the Merrick that we used to feed her instead of the vet stuff.

It seems like for whatever reason Nicki likes when more prep work is put into her meals, perhaps just because that is how things were for years before her intestinal episode.  By the time I put her meal down she is only inches away, ready to start gobbling it down. It’s good to see her so interested in eating again.

Tonight I have a rather inconvenient schedule.  I have to drive home, let the dogs out and then drive all the way back to town for a running club meeting.  I will need to skip the typical post meeting drink/eat/bullshit session at South Street so I can get back home to make the dogs dinner.