That's the scoop.

Poop. It’s a nasty thing. Nobody wants to smell it, touch it, or have to deal with it in any way. When you have kids, I suppose it starts losing some of the stigma because you are often covered in it. But when you get a puppy, you generally don’t have to deal with poop unless you are picking it up, or, if there is the occasional accident while potty training.

Not so for us. Dalton was so little and unbalanced that he would often step in his poop. And by often, I mean every other time we let him out. To make it worse, he had diarrhea for a good 2 months because of stress and food changes. When we first brought him home, we were carrying him up and down our stairs, one, because he was so little, and two, because he often had shit on his paws. So around 3 or 4 in the morning, we would groggily get out of bed, put on boots and a coat, and stumble outside. Dalton would step in crap, we would carry him inside, and struggle to clean his paws as he squirmed and cried. We often were waking each other up in the middle of the night to do a “poo paw check”, not that we were sleeping anyway.

After a few weeks of this, while we should have been teaching our dog his name, we had taken to calling him “poopy puppy paws”. The worst part was that he was growing fairly rapidly, getting harder to hold, and less interested in being held. We did a lot of laundry, and used a lot of hand soap…….

Once Dalton was around 3-3 ½ months old, I think he figured out the whole balance while dumping thing. (Praise Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Satan, whomever) But oddly enough, we still spend about 10% of our time dealing with his shit in one way or another. We are either talking about it:

“Did Dalton poop when you let him out a while ago?”

“Well, I found pieces of plastic/tennis ball/ shoe/ the rug in his poop again.”

“I stepped in dog shit.”

“How are his poops?”

“He finally shit out the other half of the rope toy…”

“We forgot a poop bag again.”

“It’s off the trail, nobody’s looking, just leave it!”

Cleaning it up, or wishing he wouldn’t do it so much. I never thought that dog owners had to spend so much time focused on fecal matter, but here we are. Please tell me we are not the only people who spend so much time thinking about what comes out our dogs bum…..