Morning Routine–Emmy Style

After food, Emmy’s favorite parts of the day are her walks. The neighborhood is her Oz. Her own walk of fame on sidewalks lined with invisible “Emilia” stars. She is a neighborhood celebrity—“The Barbie Dog” to the little girls who run to see her as she passes their yards. Cars stop on the road for their occupants to call out high pitched hellos. Neighbors wait on porches to bring her a treat. She is in her element, and she is golden.

The lead up to the morning walk, however, is an Olympic level challenge, requiring speed, patience, and all the endurance a bowl of Cheerios can give.

You see, Golden Retriever puppies make the most advanced AI systems seem lacking.

Here is how it works:

Each night, put clothes out for the next day, so the ginger haired octopus doesn’t need to be near the closet while you decide what to wear. The closet holds special treasures. Sandals with dangerous buckles, long plastic dry cleaning bags, winter boots stuffed with tasty tissue paper, unworn suede Papillio wedges that you fell in love with just before the puppy fever, and the Holy Grail: extra toilet tissue that if she grabs it just right, she can unravel the roll, be out the door, around the corner and halfway downstairs before you can say the second syllable of “EMILIA!”

Then, after breakfast say, “Ready to go for a walk?”

Emmy responds with the circle dance, tail wagging, front paws bowing, and a single bark.

You then say, “Okay, I need to get dressed.” This innocent statement begins the morning dash.

Emmy darts upstairs to the bedroom, stopping in the hall bathroom to check that no one left a facecloth or a curling iron cord within reach, peeks behind the shower curtain in case anything changed since last night, and grabs the bathmat, which is never interesting enough to take further than the doorway.

Once in the hall, she’ll pause, survey the other rooms in case the office is open, which it never is, but she knows one day she’ll get back in there. The room where you keep so many pages of delicious paper. The room where the paper shredder lives, and despite its claims to crosscut fifteen pages at a time, it is rookie level compared to Emmy’s ability to destroy Shakespeare’s entire writing career in seconds.

Office door secure, she remembers why you’re upstairs. Clothes.

She’ll grab your discarded robe, prepared to hide it under the bed, when she remembers this is the room where the hamper lives. Innocent ovals decorate its sides, just enough open space to dislodge a sock, and she’s on her way, prancing to the hall, doe legs extended beneath a wagging tail.

But you know better. This is a ploy, a distraction that a seasoned Golden mom can ignore. If you choose to chase her for the sock, she will loop around, go under the bed, hide the sock, and dart out the other side to grab the day’s outfit that you have left unattended. You’re taking stock of the detritus under the bed—at least five socks, a slipper, two dish towels, and wait . . . a mason jar ring??? and she has darted to another room where she finds a basket of clean laundry and is dancing down the stairs, teeth clamped tightly on a bra while she struggles to untangle her paw from the strap without tumbling headfirst to the linoleum below. Bras, she has learned, are an important treasure. She has no idea of monetary value, but is aware that you WILL chase her for this. As she does the brassiere ballet, you can slow her down by calling out, “I don’t care, keep it,” which is a lie, but gives her pause and you time to get dressed, remembering to put socks on, or the process starts over once she’s caught. But don’t take too long—the paused dance will quickly turn to destruction, which is expensive and a choking hazard.

Pilfered undergarment retrieved after the bribe of a high value treat, and the repetition of “drop it” 1,470 times, you are almost ready to go. However, in your haste, you’ve left the gate to the living room opened, and she’s grabbed a throw pillow from the dogless years and is swinging it like the overstuffed suede owes her money. It’s dry clean only and is now adorned with webs of saliva and bits of kibble from her as yet unbrushed teeth. The pillow, at least, is awkward and cumbersome and she quickly abandons it when it slows her down. You toss the gooey disaster onto the chair where it lands with the lame promise that you’ll do something to clean it up later.

Is it time for a walk yet? Almost.

Now you need to grab a snack bag of cheese bits or chicken. Emmy is in a fear imprint stage, and you’ll need to understand how she processes the world around her. You will need to get her to walk past the driveway where the bounce house was three weeks ago (screaming kids probably warning her of puppy-eating monsters), and past the house where the roof was repaired last Thursday (workers yelling—large pieces of roof sliding on a giant tarp that even from across the street could fly at random and land on unsuspecting puppies), and the house where the English Bulldog runs out to the edge of his invisible fence, barking like a hell dog and warning of the puppocalypse.

While you’re setting up the bribe treats, she’s forgotten there’s a walk ahead and is holding fight club with a stuffed bear that you now realize is unravelling at the neck, so you’ll need to discreetly hide him until you can do surgery, or she’ll literally eat his stuffing.

Finally ready, you grab her leash, but this whole process has made her thirsty. She stops at the bowl stand for a drink. Once finished, in a single movement she grabs the water bowl, puddling the contents onto the kitchen floor and darting onto the couch, knowing you’ll chase her because there’s still water in the bowl.

So once you’ve caught the bowl, and used your best choreographed wrestling moves to keep her from grabbing the towel while you dry the floor, you realize your socks are wet.

And you need to go

back upstairs

to change.

Again.