Photo taken with iPhone 12 Pro Max.

A while back (600 hours to be exact, but who’s counting?) my dog slipped a disc in his back. After a day of being distressed, the diagnosis was confirmed by CT.

So he is on ‘crate rest’…that is, minimal activity. For 8 weeks.

Slipped discs and hellfire cute.

Juno has been a champ about it. We keep him in a small cage most of the time, with evening nap privileges lifted up on the couch whist we watch TV. He also gets some supervised garden sniffing time….to take care of business.

The Ju-Ju-mobile.

As we don’t feel comfortable leaving him alone in the cage, our life has become one big tag-team adventure in time management. We purchased a cheap dog pram which, despite my initial eye-rolling, has been a godsend. Loading him up in the Ju-Ju-mobile, we take him out with us for coffee and walks. Good for his mental health, essential for our sanity.

Bed in a box.

Sleeping has been a problem. Juno normally sleeps on the bed with us (I know, I know) and will not tolerate the existential indignity of overnighting in his cage.

Our solution? Sleep with him in the cage of course.

Well….sort of. To be specific, I built an elevated wall (out of an old playpen) around the perimeter of the bed to stop any nocturnal shenanigans.Each night we all pile in and then close the gate. This is normal right?

A couple of times I have gotten up in the middle of the night and in a barely half awake state,
fallen over the wall,
folding the whole sketchily constructed thing down like a stack of dominoes,
and necessitating a 2am reconstruction.

Dogs. I get that we don’t deserve them…. but do they deserve us?