I met a magic puppy today. At first I thought she was a regular puppy, cute and lovable with long floppy ears and silky hair, but she wasn't a regular puppy. She wasn't even just an exceptional puppy. She was a MAGIC puppy.
All puppies are cute in their own right, and I've been lucky enough to own a couple of amazingly cute ones, but I have to admit that not even Loki (the walking Gund doll) was magic as well. At first I thought she was just a really adorable English Springer Spaniel puppy, black and white with silken waves and that amazing rubber-bones quality that is shared by puppies and mice. The adorableness was amped up a bit when I picked her up and discovered that her skin was actually two sizes too big for her body. So cute! She smelled bad, like a dog who's spent too much time in a crate, so that knocked a couple points off of her cuddliness.
Ben and I decided that of the three dogs upstairs she was the one worthy of hanging out downstairs and watching Elf with us, so we liberated her from her crate and headed down the stairs. I cuddled her against my chest and she wrapped her little paws around my neck and hung her head over my shoulder. I think she may have stuck her tongue out at the other dogs as I was shutting the door.
It only took a few minutes of playing with her on the mattress sofa for the smell to start to get to me, so I gave her a bath. I honestly cannot think of another animal that wasn't mine that I willingly bathed. That's weird, to just wash someone else's dog, but I couldn't take the smell any more.
After her bath Millie the Magic Puppy ran around the downstairs a bit, diving into pillows, burrowing into blankets, and generally doing insanely cute puppy things. And that's when it hit me. She'd been in her crate for an hour that I know of (longer, I'm sure, since she was in her crate when I got there), and downstairs for another hour or so, and I had yet to hear her make any noise. She also hadn't appeared to want any food or water, not even while bathing. Most animals try at least once to drink the bath water, but she didn't even taste it. And to cap it all off, she hadn't pottied, not even a little piddle. Puppies her age usually have to pee every hour, hour and a half at the longest.
I'm sure it is a scientifically proven fact now. She is actually a stuffed animal that some wonderful wizard (or witch) has put a spell on and set loose into the world. She's the Pinocchio of puppies, except animals rarely lie so the nose thing shouldn't be much of a problem. She is a beautiful solstice miracle and I have to wonder if this spell will make her more real with time and allow her to grow up, or if she'll remain a perfect floppy puppy forever.
