Let's just be clear here. My maternal instinct is to look at my husband pleadingly and ask, "can you make them stop doing this?"

What the hell. You'd think we didn't have two dogs for seventeen years that we both got as puppies! What the hell. I'm totally confounded. Is it because we each had one dog to ourselves for those all important first two years? Do two puppies cancel out training?

Here's the situation. First, the dogs started having massive, exploding diarrhea. Only at night. So we were coming down to disasters morning after morning. Turns out, the problem was not due to eating sticks and drinking from creek water. No, the bad mother had switched dog food brands on them and as the vet informed us, this was akin to taking them down to Mexico and making them drink the water. Who knew? I guess good mothers know these things. So, we start cooking for our canines. Boiled hamburger and boiled rice. The dogs love it and we're soon back to normal (except for the cooking for our dogs part which is NOT normal). We think we're in the clear and start weaning them back onto dry. This morning, yes, bright-sunny-almost-Easter morning I come down to death by diarrhea.

But that's not all I'm doing wrong. The dogs do not come when I call. The dogs run off wildly. It's a real problem. I don't want them on leashes all the time. It's not my way with dogs. But right now, there is no choice. If Ollie is not on a leash-- he's gone (oh, and by the way, Ollie is, ahem, six months old and his hormones are raging to the point he has made a love slave out of his poor little brother. That's to say, he is a hump-meister). So, maybe a part of this is the need to go find a bitch to fuck and Henry will follow him anywhere. Maybe part of it is you can't train two at once. But without a doubt the biggest part is I suck at this and want them to just understand English and do whatever I say.

That's how it works with kids, right?

got 2 cents?