Before in another country.

Some dogs are very food motivated and will do anything for a kibble of food. Hell I have some that will sit just to lick my fingers. I am sure most folks that have pets know this motivation and it is just part of life with pets.  But when you have a child that is so food motivated it sometimes makes me scratch my head. Now she learns quick if food is involved and cannot retain nothing without an injection of food.  The rest of the family has teased her so much about this food thing she tries to never say she is hungry first. She will try to get us to say something about food first.

Over the weekend we went to the Pawlooza Dog festival in London ON.  We started out late Friday night after I got home from work. Everyone was hungry and we were running late and still had to take one of the girls to another function out of the way of our intended destination. So in these times we do the Micki D’ thing. None of us like Mac Donald’s but it fills the empty space between the navel and back bone. The first thing is they did not make my order so all I got was French fries. Now put that together with chips and it falls a little short of a healthy dinner. Now as this has happened a few times in the past because I get the food and drive then once down the road the discovery is made I hate to go back so we just make do, I don’t lean either…… , the girls knows not to say too much in these cases as it will set my bad mood off. Again the next morning is hurry, hurry ,hurry so off to Mac Donald’s we go again for breakfast.  Now seriously I am choking down this stuff but time is way more important at this point.  Lunch did not improve much as the girls went out and found hotdogs for all of us. My daughter ask me if I wanted mine with onions or without as she holds out two hotdogs. I told her did not matter, so I got the one with onions. She started eating before me and said “ Mom this is really dry” well I don’t put much thought into it as I am hungry. I took a great big mouth full and started to chew, then told her “Hell mine is crunchy”. I am not sure what happened to these hot dogs but they were not eatable and so I finished my bun with mustered and onion’s then wash it down with a bottle of water. Now that being said the foods was the only part of the day that was bad. We had a great day and all were exhausted at the end. Again we just stopped and got a bucket of chicken with all the fixings and went back to camp and ate.

The next morning we pack up and head into town to get something to eat. We have two dogs that cannot be left alone in the van as they will eat each other so having a nice sit down breakfast is out of the question.  As we are discussing our options little one pipes up “Ma I am sick of food”. What! You’re never sick of food so “Who are you and what did you do to little one”? The taunts and jeering started in, as this is something no one in the family would have ever thought she would say. This kid eats everything, literally everything. We ended up with Subway and called it good and headed for the states.

As we get into check point at the boarder I hand over all the human documents and say “this is the human papers first”. I got the look, the look that says what are you talking about. Now each of the girls have three pieces of ID’s and I have a pass port so it is a fist full of stuff I am handing him. As he sort through all of it he looks at me and ask, how we are all connected, where do we live and why did we go to Canada. I explained the foster kids in and out of the system and I am the foster parent, and I have permission to take them out of country with a letter from the local judge. We were at a dog show in London. The whole time he is looking at Gertrude standing at the window being her normal busy body dog self. Then he says “what kind of dog is that”?  Then it was all downhill after that, as I explained the whole hairless dog thing in its entirety. At one point he dropped his hands down to his lap with all the documents and just sat there hanging on to every word I had to say. We started to show him each of the dogs as they are so different and he entered into the is huge conversation about the dogs.  I started to worry as the lines grew behind us. At one point I said “Wow, all those folks behind me are going to get mad at me. He said “I don’t care I give everyone who enters USA my undivided attention and screen them thoroughly and the dog conversation continued.  He was checking out the PIO’s with such interest I thought I might have a potential adopter on my hands. Finally I pushed the paper work for the dog out the window to him and he just shook his head and said anyone that does all you do I have no worries that you take fine care of all your animals, it’s been interesting ,welcome to back to the USA and have a nice day. That had to be my most interesting border crossing I have ever had.

We barely made it out of the Port Huron area when the little one says” Mom are you hungry”? I said “No, we just ate a couple hours ago” Why? She then says “I’m hungry”. What the Hell you just told us you were sick of food a few hours ago. She said “ya Ma, but that was before in a different country. I will skip the name calling that started with the girls as they yelled at her. I just shook my head and thought how wonderful it would be at home in my laundry room, alone with a mountain of laundry and the world would make sense again.