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Life With Dogs

Backyard Houdini

By Janette HamiltonPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Phoenix out on the yard.

Have you ever had one of those mornings where you spring from bed knowing something isn’t right? I had one this morning.

You see every morning my wonderful hubby gets up at the crack of dawn (because that is when the doggie alarm clock tells him to get up). He makes a pot of coffee and takes the dogs out for their run.

Simple and efficient right? Usually, and even this morning that part went just fine, until my husband forgot to lock the backdoor that is.

The lock set on our backdoor is one of the type that you pull down on instead of twist to open the door. It makes opening the back door so easy it’s child’s play. We learned a few months ago that our Dane mix, Phoenix, has no trouble opening the door with a flick of his giant paw, so we began making sure to lock the door after bringing the dogs in.

Well hubby gapped this morning and forgot to turn the lock on the backdoor before leaving me sleeping blissfully upstairs and heading off to work. A couple hours later I was awakened by Phoenix’ incessant barking. “Be quiet!” I hollered at him rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Turning to look at the clock I realized that it was after nine. My hubby had been at work for an hour already, so why was I hearing my dog barking in the yard?

I jumped out of bed so quickly I almost landed flat on my face when the blankets wrapped themselves around my legs. I tore down the stairs to find my backdoor wide open, and two out of three of my large breed dogs standing by the fence barking at the high school kids heading to school for second period.

Now those of you who have known me for any length of time probably already know that we take dog ownership very responsibly. We are not the kind of people who let our dogs out and walk away, if they are out we are out. As a result, none of the neighbors have ever complained about our dogs incessant barking, and have never found them running at large. That is the way we like it.

However, this morning hubby forgot to lock the door, it didn’t take long for Phoenix to figure this out, he is, after all, a very intelligent dog. Door open Phoenix and Mysty took the opportunity to explore the backyard free of supervision.

For the most part they just ran around and played, and then…the high school students began heading for school.

Now Phoenix doesn’t have a lot of issues, but baseball caps (especially worn backwards) for some reason make him very reactive. What do most high school boys wear on their heads these days? Yep! Basbeball caps! Phoenix began to bark, and bark, and bark, until he woke me up.

Now all of this may seem rather silly to most of you, big whoop, the dogs got out in their own yard and made a little noise right? No big deal! Except when you realize that while most of our fences are six feet tall, the ones closest to the road are only four feet high. Supervised, the dogs would never dream of jumping the fences, unsupervised, I wasn’t so sure, hence the panic!

Luckily, I made it into the backyard before anyone got the bright idea to go over the fence! (Did I mention that the fencing panels for replacing the low section of fence are waiting to be put up?)

Possible catastrophe averted I headed back inside for a VERY strong cup of coffee. Trust me, I remembered to lock the back door on my way in. Now every time I pass the dog den, Phoenix looks at me as if to say, “Aw Mom you spoiled our fun!”

Mental note to self: change the door handle on the backdoor to the traditional twist type, at least Phoenix Houdini hasn’t figured out how to open those yet!

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