Hmmm...maybe we should have named her 'Winona'

...and yes, that's a 'klepto joke' for ya! Aly has some new horrible, yet entertaining habits as of lately.

Aly is a klepto. It started out with a couple of Barbie dolls ending up in the backyard. Then one day, one of the running shoes I had kicked off next to my desk at night was gone the next morning. It was in the backyard.

Yes, shoes and toys seem like obvious temptations to a boxer puppy. Who hasn't been tempted to chew off a Barbie foot and then drag her to your secret playground, known as the backyard? I know I have. But how on earth does one explain her fascination with fruit? We have a table in the living room where we keep a fruit bowl. Sometimes, the larger bags of apples and bananas don't immediately get taken out of the bags on the table and put into the bowl. Since poor Aly currently has more leg length than she does brainpower, she can easily reach things on the table yet cannot easily be reasoned with. Yes, this is an 'awkward phase' indeed. I had seen her trying to get something off the table. I didn't see what she was after, but though I'd chased her away before she could nab it.

I guess I was wrong. While I didn't notice it right away, the next morning I found an entire bunch of bananas lying just outside of her dog door. They had bite marks in them and they were pretty bruised up...and they were bananas for crying out loud! If that had been a table where we kept lunch meat or cheese or something, I would have been worried. But fruit???

I think there's something wrong with my dog.

Just after the 'banana incident,' I saw her grab an entire 5 lb bag of Granny Smith apples and high tail it out the dog door. I was able to save those apples, but she must have done it another time too, as she now has a stash of apples hidden outside somewhere. Once or twice a day, she brings an apple in from the backyard and eats it in my living room floor.

Is it safe to say that perhaps my house has gone to the dogs?

This list of things she's taken gets longer every single day. She used to let herself into the girls' room and grab a toy as if it was her own personal toy box. Those ended up in the living room and she really only chews up the hands and feet of the Barbie dolls. So, we would usually just groan about the extra clutter and send it back to their room. Now, those things end up in the backyard. Our sprinklers go on at 10:00 at night and I can't tell you how many things have had a 'shower' in the past week or two. And, while it certainly makes ME feel better to chase her down with flames shooting out of my eyes, it doesn't seem to really matter to her. She appears to have no short term memory whatsoever and is really in a whole new state of mind from one minute to the next. Or, maybe she's just that stubborn.

The thing that seems to work the best is when we put her on a leash and just make her sit next to us, whereever we are. We call it her 'time out' and it's the only thing that seems to calm her down. It doesn't necessarily seem to sink in as to WHY she's in a time out, but at least she stops whatever obnoxious thing she's doing at the time. David told me today that getting Aly was a heck of a way of making him appreciate our other dog, Lily. As amusing as that seems, Aly was actually HIS IDEA. HAHAHA! I'm not taking the credit for this one!

She's only six months old, so I guess it stands to reason that we have another 10 or 12 years to deal with this phase. I hear that boxers never really grow up.

I really hope I heard that wrong.