Big news!
Well, OK, big news if you don’t have a life: the puppies eyes are starting to open. I turned around to look in the box while the laptop was booting up and saw one little puppy eye squinting at me for a split second before it shut again.
In the realm of on-going sagas, all the focus is now on the yellow alien with everyone else apparently forgotten, no longer needed, or placed where they need to be to do whatever they’re supposed to be doing so there’s no reason to move them. Yesterday afternoon at around 4, Fric moved Old Yellow from the living room up to the office. When I checked on the pups at 5:00, it was in the box with them. This morning it was back on the bed with me where it stayed until I took food and fresh water up to the pen for Frica. (For reasons known only to her, she prefers not to eat breakfast with the other dogs.) Shortly thereafter I heard her crying at the bedroom door and opened for her then went back downstairs to do yoga. While I was doing that, she brought the yellow one down and initially was very protective of it any time BeeBee got anywhere near it. But when the puppies called, she left it with nary a backwards glance. It was only after I took her out around 8 that she picked it up and brought it back up to the office again. This time she put it in the antique underbed “drawer” that Watson sleeps in and was sleeping in when she did it, and there it and he remains.
Ann reminded me that Frica’s sister did the same thing with a toy when she had her pups, but Ann can’t remember whether the behavior faded or she–Ann–was just so busy she didn’t notice. The display fascinates me because the basic repertoire of animal behaviors is elegantly spare (sort of like our alphabet) but they can use them in new ways to communicate different messages as well as combine them to achieve that same effect. There are aspects of the alien’s movement that are akin to those a female animal would display toward her young–make a nest, moving the nest, retrieving young removed from the nest and putting them back. But there are also those displays that make it clear that, if she does view the alien as a pup, she also recognizes that it’s different from her own. Otherwise, it would always be in the box with her pups rather than moved around, left outdoors, or downstairs.
Maybe the toy is like that slinky black dress I hung in plain sight in my closet when I was pregnant, a reminder that I would not always look like beached whale and that my carefree days would someday return. Both slinky and carefree evaded me and I finally gave the dress away without regrets. Maybe as the pups get older, Fric will come to the same conclusion.