Bear Cub? Bear Tub? Same Thing

I solved a mystery the other day; call me Detective Awesome. The mystery had to do with our dog, our bathtub and the drain.


Our dog is a basket case. And yes, I'm referring to the same dog I mentioned here. He's still ours, but we'll discuss that another day; I don't have any enough alcohol in my house to make it through that discussion at this moment.

So back to my lunatic of a pup - he gets into the most random stuff and he has the most awkward habits. 

Awkward habit number one: When he lays in our room he lays with his head under the bed. 

What's that? You want photographic evidence? You got it…

He's not doing anything. Not looking for anything. Not attempting to get all the way under. He's simply chillin'….

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Awkward habit number two: He stalks the cat

If the cat is on the opposite side of a door from him. He sits or lays at the door until we open it. If he and the cat are in the same room together he is always within a foot of two of my poor feline. Oh, and forgive the terrible quality of all these pictures, they are all caught in the moment which means I typically have to use the camera on my phone!

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Awkward habit number three: He's part ninja and acts on his ninjastic instincts. 

I know this to be true because he seems to sense that Owen is the baby of the family and therefore more likely to spill his food because anytime Owen has food, Bear is right by his side.

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Awkward habit number four: He sleeps like a gentleman.

Need I elaborate?

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Awkward habit number five: He thinks Owen is a puppy dog. 

Since Owen is about the same height as Bear, he seems to think that Owen is a puppy dog. Bear plays with Owen the way he plays with other dogs, he follows him around, perhaps to protect him since he is the baby of the family, but usually it's to play.

Often, if we can't find one, we just look for the other and we're bound to see the other one not far behind. Owen digs the extra attention he gets from Bear cub (or 'Bear tub' as Owen pronounces it), in the rare occasion that Bear doesn't tag along with Owen from room to room you can hear Owen whistle and say, "Come on Bear Tub, let's go."  

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Awkward habit number six: He's never far from me when I take a shower. 

He follows me here and there every now and then, but not the way he follows Owen. BUT! For some reason, anytime I take a shower, he is always in the bathroom with me. I shower with the bathroom door open, just a habit from having kids and needing to be able to hear them at all times, well, apparently Bear thinks I do it for him because he will come into the bathroom while I'm in the shower, nudge the door not-quite-completely-closed and plop down right outside of the shower. So this is what I see ever day when I step out of the shower:

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Awkward habit number six: He gets on the furniture when we aren't home.

Okay, so this is more annoying than it is awkward. He knows he isn't allowed on the furniture. never has been, not even as a little bitty puppy. This is because we knew he was going to be a moose when he got older and we didn't want to have to break him of the habit. Also, I'm not a fan of dog hair on places I sit or lay my head, so the no-dogs-on-furniture rule was a given. 

A little less than 2 years ago, I was leaving for class (I was still in college), I wasn't even out of our neighborhood when I realized I forgot something, so I turned around and went back to the house to get it. I walk in and find this:

Shenanigans.

Needless to say, I wore out his hind-end. I also set up little traps, such as folding and placing the blanket or setting the pillows a certain way in order to see if they were in the same place when I got home. Apparently the ass whoopin' helped because from that day on everything remained undisturbed…for a good two years or so. Then one day, just a few months ago, I noticed his hair on the duvet on our bed and that's when I knew he must've jumped on our bed when we weren't home. I was fed up, so now I put up a baby gate to confine him to certain areas of the house when we aren't home (such as the kitchen or the bathroom). My area of choice lately has been the master bath. 

The last couple of days, when getting home from work, I began to notice things in the bathroom that didn't make sense to me (such as the drain in the tub being plugged and a few pieces of dog hair on the shower curtain) but I just blew them off because I was mentally drained and didn't want to use what little brain power I did have to put these things together to figure out what was going on.

First, you must know that I always shut the shower curtain when I get out of the shower. Seth leaves it open, which I.don't.like. To me, it's like an open cabinet door, I can't stand it and it looks undone. Seth typically leaves before me in the mornings, therefore, I'm the last to use the shower and so the curtain gets closed.

Seth's official last day of class was this past Wednesday, this meant he got to sleep in on Thursday and so he was the last to leave the house. This meant he was the last one to use the shower that day. When I got home from work that day, one of my first stops was to the bathroom because we were meeting people for dinner so I wanted to take a quick shower beforehand. When I walked in the bathroom, Seth had left the shower curtain open, that's when I noticed dog hair in the shower and some brown paw prints. 

I was confused. So naturally, I began a conversation with Bear. Seriously, I do this all the time. I talk to him like he's a person. When I saw the paw prints and hair I just walked away from the shower and over to the sink to take my hair down as I talked to Bear saying something along the lines of, "Bubba, how did your hair get in the tub? You must've gotten in there because I see your paw prints too." I'm looking at myself in the mirror because I was brushing my hair but I was talking loud enough for him to hear me. As I'm talking I'm trying to think of the other things I had noticed over the past few days, trying to tie them all together and make sense of the drain being plugged and how that could relate to him being in the tub and why on Earth he would even get in the tub to begin with. So as I'm thinking out loud, and brushing my hair, and talking, Bear walks into the bathroom with me. Out of the corner of my eye I see him head towards the tub, the shower curtain is still open, and what does he do as if it's a regular occurrence for him? He steps right into the bathtub, does a 180 so that he's facing me, and sits down.

Who does that? 

I snapped the picture above to send to Seth, and as I'm taking the picture I noticed Bear's tail wagging, while his tail wagged he knocked the drain closed. 

Mystery of the plugged drain solved.

Have a great weekend ya'll,

Lor