The Birthday Weirdo

I felt like a horrible doggy parent this morning when I woke up and realized that Hope's observed birthday (aka the anniversary of the day we brought her home) was yesterday and I'd totally forgotten. It was just such a busy weekend we hadn't even thought of doing anything special for our crazy/sweet little girl!
Hope has now been with us for exactly five years, but sometimes it's really hard to even remember our family before this bizarre yet beautiful girl was a part of it. It's even harder to believe that three of those five years she's basically been living on borrowed time, since she's had surgery three times in the last three years for cancer. Hope is nothing if not tough as nails, and is most certainly the toughest dog in the Luce household! When I told my brother earlier today that we were celebrating her 10th birthday (although she could be anywhere from 9-12 he was quite surprised, because in most ways she definitely doesn't seem like an older dog. She still runs and jumps with great exuberance and reckless abandon.

With that said, in one other way Hope has definitely started to show her age. About six months ago we started noticing that she was getting harder to wake up in the morning and after naps. We eventually realized that her hearing was beginning to go, and in the few months since she's gone almost completely deaf. At this point she will only respond to a loud whistle, a clap or one of the other dogs barking. We're trying to incorporate sign language as much as possible to communicate with her, but let's just say that deafness has made this weird dog even weirder!

Speaking of her weirdness, this really has nothing to do with her deafness and more to do with her pica, but this morning I had to grab the camera to capture a quick video in honor of her birthday. She's been on a mushroom kick lately, and early in the mornings when there's a bunch of new mushrooms popping up she loves to snack on them. You have to run out into the yard to stop her from snarfing them all up, since of course she can't hear you when to tell her to stop (we're working a lot on the sign for "no"). This morning I didn't have the heart to run out and scold her, because she was just so cute and looked like she was having so much fun mushroom hunting! Let's hope we don't have any barfing later because of it!