Adventures of an 8 pound dog, part 2

As I said earlier, Cotton hurt is leg a few weeks ago. I'm not sure how he did it, but he managed to time it perfectly to potentially get me into a lot of trouble. Right about the time that I was starting to feel confident that I'd managed to avoid both a surprise visit from the SPCA and another trip to the vet, and we had another incident.

Cotton doesn't like to go up or down stairs. My first house didn't have any stairs in it at all, and so he never had any reason to learn how to go up and down them for the first half of his life. It wasn't until we moved to this house that he had to master 3 steps at the front, and 6 steps at the back. And - let me tell you - that was a steep learning curve. It took weeks of frustration on my part before he finally caught on.

To this day, he only goes up or down those two sets of stairs; and he doesn't even do them well.

For some reason, known only to him, Cotton jumps over the last step. Going up or down, he goes until he's two steps from the top or bottom and then LEAPS to the end.

It'd be kind of funny to watch, except that sometimes he doesn't make the leap. Lately, his been missing his mark more and more often.

Really, if you think about it, the stair risers are as high as he is; so I'm not all that surprised. It's just that his latest misfire may have been compounded by the sore leg.

Right about the time that I ruled out the necessity for a vet visit, Cotton took the stairs up to the deck, and decided to test his limits. Instead of jumping over the last step before the top, he tried to launch himself over two steps towards the top and missed.

The Dude clothes-lined himself on the edge of the top stair tread, scrambled for a few seconds and then tumbled down to the bottom before I could run to his rescue. He wasn't a very happy camper. I don't think he did any permanent damage, but I have no doubt that he gave himself some serious bruises.

He hasn't wanted to take the stairs since. He'd go down the back stairs if he was really desperate, but he waited at the bottom for me to bring him back up. Even promises of cookies weren't enough to get him to come up again on his own until a few days ago. He's still not very happy about it, but he finally started to brave the stairs again. He's reluctantly going up and down again with a lot of encouragement.

But right about the time that he started taking the stairs again, he started to hide under the bed. When all's not right in Cotton's world, he hides under the bed, so this isn't a good sign.