I went to bed early Tuesday night because Yardley was leaving for a field trip to Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning and we had to get her to school by 6 a.m. I made her a bag of snacks and a lunch for the bus ride before bed, knowing I wouldn’t want to deal with that at 5 a.m.
My two boys were still up watching TV when I headed upstairs and Doug was with our friend Tim at a Knicks game, so I told the boys to make sure the dogs were put into their crates before they went went to bed (as a reminder, the dogs cannot roam overnight because it didn’t work out when we tried that with Strud. At. All.)
It should be noted that I took part of Yardley’s lunch – chicken strips and an apple – and put it in the fridge for safekeeping. I then left the canvas bag I found to hold it all – along with everything else I had stuffed in there – on the kitchen counter. It seemed safe only because the boys were nearby, Strud won’t jump up on the counter (usually!) if someone is in the room with him, and he would be going right in his crate from there.
So, off to bed I went.
Later on, Doug got home and entered through a door that bypasses the family room. He came right up to the bedroom and closed the door whereupon he heard something that “appeared to be brushing around and pushing up against the door.” He opened it, confused. There was Strudwick, super happy to see his dad and to be upstairs. (As you know, Strud is not allowed on the second floor.)
Doug soon realized the kids must have forgotten to crate him, took him back downstairs, put him in the crate, and went to bed. I slept through all of that, and Strud’s sister Thunder – the good girl that she is – had put herself in her crate and was sleeping with the door open.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning. I got up at 5:15 a.m., got ready, woke up Yards, and went downstairs only to discover the lunch was gone. The bag was nowhere to be found. All I could think was, Yardley must have packed it. She came into the kitchen.
Me: “Where is your lunch?”
Yards: “I don’t know. I thought you had it.”
Me: “I wonder if Dad moved it just in case.”
I went upstairs and stirred Doug. “Do you know where Yardley’s lunch is?”
“No,” he said, half asleep, “but the dogs were not in their crates when I got home last night.”
Me: “WHAT??”
I went into Yates’ room. It was now 5:45 a.m. and we needed to leave. “Yates! Did you not crate the dogs last night?? Dad said they were loose. Did they eat Yardley’s lunch??”
Yates, groggily: “What? Oh, umm, I’m sorry, I forgot.” But he didn’t know anything about the lunch.
Back downstairs, I went and finally checked the family room floor. Nothing. Not a speck. Not a chip. Not a seed. No mess at all. And then I saw it. The lunch/snack bag. The one that had held two Truvani bars, salted pumpkin seeds, tortilla chips, and a cookie … into which I was going to place the chicken and apple (it’s a long bus ride!) each tucked neatly in Ziploc baggies – gone. The Ziplocs, the food, all of it was nowhere to be seen.
I grabbed whatever I could find in the pantry, plus what was leftover from the bags I had raided the night before, for Yardley and off we went to school to catch the field trip bus.
As for all that food (and plastic) in Strud’s belly? He was totally fine the rest of the day and seems to be in a great mood. Naturally. The cherry on top is what the bag formerly holding all the sustenance looks like now:
Like, why didn’t he just go in through the top of the bag? Why did he eat a hole in it? And by the way, he must have swallowed that too.
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