It’s easy for me to close my eyes and say “thank god we don’t have any kids”, but we do.  There’s two puppies in our lives that are every bit as much our kids as we could hope to have.

Sydney is daddy’s little girl.  She has an underbite that prevents her from closing her front teeth completely; the tongue is a permanent fixture.  She’s a soft-spoken girl who likes to be close to one person - until it’s time to eat.  Her first loyalty is to her stomach, and her reminders for her dinner are not subtle.

Muskoka is the goofball.  Silly and full of energy, he’s an extremely affectionate dog that feels the full gambit of emotions.  We got Muskoka as an 8-week old puppy; I still remember bringing him home for the first time.  That little ball of black and white fur has brown into a beautiful English Springer, and I’m proud to be his daddy.

So, the obvious question - how are they doing?  The easy answer is Sydney - she’s living with me right now.  Sydney has taken the separation well, and actually seems to enjoy the quiet time.  Of course, I have given her a lot of my time and attention and she’s never the unhappy recipient, but I also wonder what’s going through her mind as she carefully paws her way around our now-empty house.  The hardest thing is to watch her run into the master bedroom, where she’s used to leaping up on the bed to look out the window.  Now she goes running in … and stops in the middle of the room, wondering where everything went.

Dogs aren’t stupid - I’m sure she knows a lot about what’s going on.

Muskoka is having a harder time with this.  He’s with Carolyn, and apparently managed to scratch a good bit of the paint off the front door when he was left alone for the first time.  This isn’t entirely unprecedented;The paint on the door to the garage of our house was also scratched the first few times we left the dogs alone, and we’re now starting to wonder if it was Muskoka all along (we suspected Sydney at the time).

Stress sometimes causes Muskoka to not eat, but I understand he’s been eating OK so far this week.

I’m worried about both of my kids; if there’s a “victim” in this separation, it’s them.  I just hope they know that their daddy loves them, and will do anything for them.