Ladies and gentlemen – I do believe that I have officially met my match. She’s short, and furry, and over the course of the last week, I think I’ve cleaned up her pee roughly 700 times.

Her name is Cleo, as in Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile … maybe that should’ve been our first clue when we skipped right over the more commonly pampered puppy nickname of “princess” and jumped straight to the top of the royal lineage by instead granting her “queen” status right off the bat!  Innocently enough, we thought it would be cute because before we adopted her, she had a habit of waiting until her five brothers and sisters fell asleep, then climbing over all of them to claim her bed on top as Queen of the Pile, but little did we know that those other puppies weren’t the only ones that she’d be walking all over in the near future!

I’ve got to hand it to her, though – as a puppy, it’s a pretty brilliant system that she’s managed to come up with:

  1. Chew on anything and everything in sight.
  2. Pee on anything and everything that she didn’t get around to chewing on.
  3. Look adorable, thus effectively circumventing any possible form of punishment.

I mean, it’s common knowledge that anyone who punishes an adorable, little puppy is an absolute monster – my own wife, who I actually have grown quite fond of, transformed into a heartless madwoman right before my own eyes the very first night that Cleo came home!  It was about 10:30pm and our darling, little puppy had just gone and taken a darling, little dump on the living room carpet, so temporarily my wife put her into her cage to give her a chance to clean up.  The whining and whimpering pouring out like maple syrup before the cage door had even closed, at best she managed maybe 37 seconds before I gave in and rescued her…

I mean, who can stand to see their sweet, innocent little puppy all locked up in doggy jail?!

Not this sucker, anyways!  As if the cries aren’t bad enough, it’s really the look that’s her ultimate weapon – far too powerful to entrust to a dog of barely 8 weeks old, that’s for sure.  Think about it – even when other animals and even people do it to guilt each other, they still call it the puppy-dog face. As our friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man would say, with great power comes great responsibility, and yet here we’ve entrusted it to someone who has yet to grasp the intricate concept that taking my shoes and hiding them underneath the couch right before I need to leave makes her a bad dog!

Oh baby, no, no, no – I didn’t mean it … you’re a good girl! Who’s a good girl?!  You’re a good girl!!!

Yeah…

So needless to say if I’ve learned anything at all from my whopping seven days (and growing!) of puppy ownership thus far, it’s that clearly I’m a big, old pushover of the worst regard and that our darling Cleo quite literally could get away with murder on my watch.  Sure, there would be a big mess to clean up and someone would eventually have to deal with the cops, but it would be an adorable murder no doubt chronicled by dozens of “Awwww…”-inspiring Facebook photos that could later be used against me in a court of law.  On the upside, maybe by the time I get out my wife will have actually managed to housetrain her…

Wishful thinking, I know, but with a face like that, I guess who really needs bladder control?