My dog is getting fat. Apparently they were feeding her a little too much at the kennel last week. My husband sent an e-mail yesterday that was seriously alarming. Charlie is “waddling around the house,” it said. “I’m very concerned.” Suddenly so was I. So concerned my stomach hurt. I was sitting at my computer (wireless connected) in a university food co-op cafe by myself worrying about my fat dog 2000 miles away. Fat waddling Charlie.

You have to understand that Charlie never had a weight problem until Hannah was born. She was more concerned with sniffing a stranger in the ass than getting a treat from one. I was actually concerned at times that she was too thin, finicky eater that she was.

Along came Hannah, barfing up a storm as a baby. With Rachel I never really undestood what a burp cloth was. She never threw-up until she had the stomach flu at 9 months, and then it gushed out and seriously freaked us out. When she was a newborn, we could have gone days at a time without changing her clothes. Then with Hannah, we knew what a burpcloth was for alright, but it wouldn’t have done us any good to use one. She spewed in all directions. There was about a 5% chance of it actually landing one of those pretty little cloths. When the barf wasn’t landing on me, it was landing on the floor with a gentle splashing noise I can honestly still hear in my head, I heard it so often. Guess who was there to lick it up most of the time. Should I say it? Is it too gross?

Anyway, the point is Miss Finicky became a bit pudgy and we didn’t notice a thing. My mother-in-law would mention the weight change every time we’d visit, but we’d just shrug it off. The scale at the veterinatians’s office never lied though. In Hannah’s short-life, Charlie has gained over 15 pounds. Charlie graduated from spit-up to Gerber’s rice cereal, and now it’s whatever the hell is on the floor after Hannah has had her way with the food in her bowl. I DO ban Charlie from the kitchen while we’re eating and I do fight a constant battle to sweep it all up before Charlie gets to it. Hannah is NO help whatsoever. When my back is turned, she’s dragging her food across the floor to feed to Charlie.

So……my point is, I have a fat dog now. She was on a diet, and now it’s an even stricter regiment. My husband is feeding her some kind of low-calorie dog food and we’ve hired a dog walker to take her into the hills for a hike an hour a day while I’m gone. I guess this means Charlie will be expecting the same from me when I get home. Something to look forward to for both of us. I could use a stricter regiment.

I don’t waddle, though.

UPDATE: My husband sent me this photo today. This is Charlie squinting at the top of our overgrown slope. The slope is a whole other post.

I don’t know. She doesn’t look fat to me. Am I in denial? Is she waddling?