Iko and Li'l Paws

Dear George,

Iko and Li'l Paws are very good sleepers.  Back home in New Orleans they normally get up about 7 a.m., but we retirees have a much more relaxed schedule.  When the dogs first arrived I set the alarm for 9, but soon I discovered that they are content to sleep in till 10 a.m. or later.  Li'l Paws, though the smaller of the two, gets into our bed at night by first jumping up on the cedar chest.  Iko doesn’t try that, and he initially decided to sleep in my closet next to my smelly gym bag.  Then I started lifting him into our bed, and he’s slept there ever since.  He is fascinated with the odor of human breath, and some mornings he climb onto my chest, stretches out so his nose is near my mouth, and naps for another thirty minutes or so.  

Our daughter-in-law K’s sister lives in Northern California, and K and J decided to ride out the coronavirus pandemic there, a wise decision since New Orleans has become one of the nation’s hotspots.  K and the kids flew out in mid-March, and J drove up to Cincinnati to leave the dogs in our care.  This has worked out well.  Though it’s been several years since our sheepdogs died, we still miss them a lot, and Iko and Li'l Paws make “sheltering in place” much more tolerable.  Lots of walks, rough-housing for me, loyal companions, and more laughter around the house.  Among other benefits, my blood pressure dropped from 140/90 to 120/70 shortly after the dogs arrived.  

Iko is a miniature Schnauzer with a sweet personality.  If I remember correctly, I think he was a street dog before he joined J and K’s family.  Compared to our sheepdogs, he’s a little guy.  Twenty inches from nose to butt, 17 inches high at the shoulder, 20 pounds.  I would describe Iko as friendly and mellow.  He bonded with us immediately, likes to growl and play fight, rolling on his back and kicking his legs in the air, and stands with his front paws on my desk chair arm to let me know that I’m spending too much time on the computer.  

Li'l Paws is more feisty even though he’s a pipsqueak compared to Iko — 17 inches long, 12 inches high, 13 pounds.  He’s a Yorkie/Chin mix.  Despite being a tiny little dog, he’s very boisterous, and seems to have a Napoleon complex.  Whenever Iko comes over for some affection, Li'l Paws jumps in front of him and hogs the limelight.  Li'l Paws is also pretty noisy on the street, barking ferociously at all the big dogs and letting them know he is a force to be reckoned with.  He’s always in the lead as we walk, tugging at the leash and pulling me along.  For a thirteen-pounder, Li'l Paws is remarkably powerful.  I think if he were my size he would probably be capable of pulling a freight train.  He also has a thing for ladies underwear, depleting Katja’s wardrobe day by day.  One evening he raced past me in the bedroom and seemed to disappear.  I finally found him underneath our king-sized bed.  He’d absconded with a pair of undies.   I reached in to get them, and Li'l Paws let out a vicious growl and bit my hand, drawing blood.  Remembering that dogs have a wild side, I let him keep his ill-begotten  treasure.

The dogs are very attached to humans.  Katja sleeps in most mornings, and I go down the street to get a loaf of salt rye bread and a cinnamon twist at Graeters.  Iko and Lil Paws station themselves at the kitchen door when I leave, and they are still standing there in the exact same position fifteen minutes later when I return.  When we watch TV, Lil Paws jumps up on the couch between us, and Iko stretches out on the floor at our feet.  If anybody leaves the room, the dogs follow faithfully right behind them.       

Last week when I picked up Graeters pastries Katja was still asleep so I arranged them on paper  plates on our solarium table.  When she woke up, I told her that her cinnamon twist was waiting downstairs.  She went to get it but it wasn’t there.  I discovered that I’d left a chair too close to the table.   A little scoundrel (or maybe two) had gotten up and enjoyed a feast of sweets.  I’m sure that those pastries were bigger than either dog’s stomach, but there wasn’t even a crumb left.

The dogs’ eating habits are strange, to say the least.  With our sheepdogs, we were accustomed to one meal at breakfast time and a second at supper, with the dogs gobbling up their bowls in a minute or two.  Iko and Li'l Paws, though, are on a different regimen.  They share one bowl which is kept full 24 hours a day, and they just take turns eating whenever they feel like it.  Katja refills the bowl every two or three days when it gets low, and, when she puts it down, the dogs give a quick sniff but otherwise show little interest.  Later Li'l Paws might pick up a couple of pellets with his teeth and take them to the next room to chew them up.  Iko eats a bit from the bowl, but rarely more than a mouthful or two.  Despite a never-ending supply of food, the dogs are very casual about eating, and the bowl stays pretty full all day long.  Very mysterious.     

I take the dogs out 4 times a day: 10 a.m., 2 p.m., 6-ish, and 10 p.m.  When I pick up the leashes to get ready to go Iko jumps up and down and barks, and Li'l Paws runs around in tiny   circles.  Li'l Paws always leads the way on the walk, while Iko is more leisurely, stopping to sniff every spot that another dog has been at.  I kept count on a recent walk, and Li'l Paws peed 3 times on our 8-block trip while Iko left his mark 22 times.  Li'l Paws would like to go out more if he could.  Our friend Jennifer stopped by last week, and I let the dogs out on the patio to greet her.  Li'l Paws promptly managed to nudge the patio door open with his nose and took off like a flash.  Jennifer went running after him, and I followed behind, but Li'l Paws was a lot faster than either of us.  He ran behind our garage, up our neighbor’s driveway, down the sidewalk next to busy Ludlow Avenue, then back up the east side of our house.  Lucky for us, he  stopped momentarily in our driveway, and Jennifer yelled, “STAY!!!”  Startled by her authoritative voice, Li'l Paws froze in place and started trembling.  Jennifer scooped him up, and we avoided catastrophe.

J had originally planned to return and pick up the dogs in a week or two, but now it’s hard to tell what the future will bring.  We are happy that our family is in a safer place, and we are having a fine time with our canine visitors.  No one really knows what the next step will be.  We’ll just go with the flow.  So far Iko and Li'l Paws are disinterested in the pandemic.    

Love,

Dave