14 days until Kyndall achieves perfection?

We’ll all set our clocks forward 14 days from this evening (in the wee hours of March 8). I’m dreaming about it, not because I like the idea of losing an hour of sleep, but because I’m fantasizing that once we’re past it, life with Kyndall will be perfect.

There are already so many things to appreciate about her. Here are a few:

— She almost never has a toileting accident in the house; she sits by the door and whines when she needs to go out.

— She has never vomited as a result of eating something she shouldn’t.

— She follows us around the house and almost always races to us when we call her.

— For the most part, she’s stopped trying to bite and chew on us.

— She’s happy to lay by us or chill out in her kennel, playing with one of her toys.

— Only rarely does she try to steal one of our possessions and run off with it.

One of the only bad things about her, in fact, is that she invariably wakes around 5:30 and begins to whimper softly in her kennel. One of us (usually Steve) gets out of bed to take her and Tucker downstairs and out to the lower back yard. Sometimes Kyndall pees urgently or clearly has to poop. But more often, she doesn’t seem that desperate. (We try hard to cut off her access to water after 5:30 p.m., so that she doesn’t have to pee in the night.) We think instead she’s responding to the sky beginning to subtly lighten; hearing the first trills of birdsong. It’s time to get up and start LIVING! (Or so we imagine her thinking).

After being rudely awakened in this manner, whichever one of us takes the dogs out then confines them in Steve’s office (Kyndall in her kennel there; Tucker on his bed but nonetheless a source of companionship.)

We crawl back into bed and try to go back to sleep, usually unsuccessfully, until 6:30, when we rise to feed the beastly ones their breakfast.

This is where my dream comes in. The upcoming time change will mean it will stay dark later. Kyndall won’t know anything about what the clock says! Maybe she’ll start her whimpering at 6:30 instead of 5:30!

Steve points out that as the days lengthen, this slim period of grace will soon evaporate. But in another six weeks, she’ll be a older and more mature perfect puppy, no?