Friday, April 1, 2011

Escape Artist Extraordinaire

If you've been stopping by for a while, you may recall that Santa brought our grands a puppy this Christmas. They named him Dexter and absolutely adore him; they also couldn't wait for Dora and Bella (us too, maybe) to meet him, since they also adore our girls. We have laughed at his playful antics and oohed at his joyful abandon...puppies and babies are so much alike. They come in these precious, helpless, awesome little packages to inspire a love like no other!

Since we've been here though, I often refer to him as Houdini; it seems there is no enclosure from which he cannot escape!

Not wanting to leave him in his little kennel all day, they had purchased a 30" high wire play pen. It wasn't long before they would come home to find him curled up [insert any accessible place in the house]. Even though he couldn't climb on or jump off of anything higher than a very few inches when they were home, he managed to climb out of his pen when they were gone!

Last week Sandee decided to thwart him by placing the pen snugly around this table in her kitchen. In theory, the table would provide a 'roof' for his pen so that he could not climb out. I can't imagine why I didn't get a photo of that, but...

This table holds the kids' art and project supplies. It is very special to Sandee because my parents went to housekeeping with this (as they say where I grew up) when they got married in 1947; she is thrilled to have it in her home. Anyway, every time, we came back home to find that Dexter/Houdini had pushed the pen enough to create an escape hatch at the top.

She was not giving up...yet. Sandee created the ultimate enclosure next to the game table in the family room by using binder clips to secure a sleeping bag over the entire pen. Yesterday morning, before Rich and I left to run some errands, we placed him in the pen and clipped the sides together from top to bottom, confident that Sandee had built the perfect solution.

Alas, when we returned home, this is what we found...
...and Dexter had disappeared. We both called him and searched for him, inside and outside. I was getting seriously concerned that he had injured himself during his escape. Finally, Rich found him...sound asleep in his favorite corner of the kids' bathroom.


It's going to take some serious ingenuity to keep this boy locked up!

Lovin' Life ~~ And the Antics of Our Three Dogs
Bev

1 comment:

  1. You might actually need to build a hinged, wooden roof for that pen, but make certain he isn't on a floor he can dig into!

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