Things I Tell My Wife by Matt Knutson

“Did your sister seriously eat the last two pieces of cake right before your family left?” I asked my wife out of frustration. I had been eyeing a piece of that cake since breakfast and was hopeful I’d be in the middle of chocolate bliss later in the day, but upon lifting up the tinfoil, only crumbs remained.

When Sera confronted her sister on the phone, her entire family denied eating the cake and I thought we’d need to hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of the story. Turns out we just needed to wait.

That evening Beesly, our dog, did something we had never seen her do before. She put her two feet up on the kitchen island and began sniffing the tinfoil that once protected our now-missing double layer chocolate cake. We were shocked. Further inspection revealed dog fur on the plate and our suspicions were confirmed. My sister-in-law didn’t eat the cake; my own dog did. I had been betrayed by man’s best friend.

Immediately panic set in as I realized the amount of chocolate our pup had consumed several hours ago. Googling symptoms and quantities of chocolate a dog can have without being poisoned resulted in complex and fast math taking place. My eyes kept flashing toward the phone, wondering if I needed to make an after-hours call to the veterinarian. All the websites I frantically visited indicated that too much time had passed for the vet to make a difference, so I resolved to calculating once more how much chocolate Beesly had ingested and matched that amount with her weight to find out the toxicity.

The websites indicated that she should be okay, but I should never trust what I read on the internet, right? I sought out a visual inspection of Beesly and found her laying on the dining room floor, slightly panting and a grin on her face. She had no regrets.

I went to sleep that night worried about Beesly. We had been working so hard to with her training and finally had given her more independence. Now that we’ve realized she could have been sneaking food off the kitchen island for months, we’re back to the beginning. Is this what parenting is like?

How often did Sera and I “pull a Beesly” growing up and figuratively sneak two pieces of chocolate cake off the counter when our parents weren’t looking? (Now that I’m thinking about it, this scenario may not be so figurative.)

While there are moments in life to stress and worry, as I initially did with Beesly, there are also the moments that follow where you reassess what went wrong and how to move forward. With Beesly, that means no more unsupervised time outside of her bed until she relearns the rules that we thought she already knew. Constant vigilance ensures Beesly behaves properly, and that’s far from taking the easy route.

So what did we learn? Our perspective isn’t always right. We were so certain that her siblings had eaten the cake and were now covering up their tracks that we didn’t notice Beesly’s fur on the cake. We turned a blind eye to our previously perfect pup because she’d never been so gutsy before.

I’m reminded of the playground parent who has a notoriously bad child but is completely unaware. Sometimes we need to change our perspective to recognize the faults in our lives, or in this case, our dog. The same evening we discovered Beesly had also eaten an entire plate full of my wife’s mokary, a bread snack from Madagascar. Who knows how long this snacking had been going on, but it has now come to a stop. Anything that Beesly can reach standing on her two paws is no longer in the safe zone, which leaves very little space left.

There is some excitement that comes with putting in the hard work to raising an animal (or person, I suppose). Eventually we’ll be able to have food on the living room table, a short foot off the ground, and Beesly will ignore it. Focusing on progress being made makes the difficulties that come with a dog seem so much more worthwhile.

 

Rochester resident Matt Knutson is the communications and events director for United Way of Olmsted County.