Games People Play

Sailor here.

The most wonderful thing happened! Mom was watching grown men wearing pajamas spit on television and she started to smell really nervous. She mumbled something about twelve innings being too much stress, and took me for an impromptu walk! I guess innings for Mom mean outings for me! One down, eleven to go...

I think I like baseball better than the other game Mom watches on TV in which grown men wearing war paint and body armor jump on each other in the mud. During these games, there’s only halftime for walks instead of the seventh inning stretch. On the other paw, playing chase in the mud sounds just like one of Zoe’s favorite things!

Last night, Mom went to an ice hockey game and says that it was pretty noisy. She says ice hockey is a cross between Keep Away and Bowling with a lot of body slamming thrown in. Now THAT sounds like a Zoe game if I’ve ever heard of one, especially since it’s played on ice! I prefer something a bit more genteel, myself.

Mom says she won’t even tell me about golf in which grown people try to beat each other with clubs. Shudder.

Mom and I play games, too. Unlike human games where there’s usually a winner and a loser, when we play, we both win. This is because when Mom wins, she smiles and laughs. When I win, I get cookies! The first game Mom taught me was Take a Bow. She said it was easy because every time she blew air on my face, I play-bowed. So now when she says, Take a Bow, I, well, I take a bow.

My favorite game is going to dog school. Mom says this isn’t really considered a game, but it is to me. Mom smiles and laughs. I get cookies.

Another game that makes Mom smile is Find. When the family is sitting around the house, Mom will say, “Sailor, go find Katy” When I walk over to Katy, Mom smiles and laughs. I get cookies. Sometimes, Katy hides upstairs, and it takes me a while to find her, particularly if I forget why my head is in the coat closet and I wander back into the kitchen to find Mom. It’s times like these that Katy gets to take a nap upstairs on Mom’s bed.

Mom and I have also started playing Find with the cookies themselves. I find this really exciting. At first, she hid a cookie in plain view, on the floor, not in the grass or anything. She told me to find it. I found it. Mom smiled. I got more cookies. Then she hid it behind the chair in my crate room. I found it. Mom smiled. I got more cookies. She made it harder, hiding my cookie in the kitchen when I was in my crate room. Then she told me to find it.

I didn’t find it. I looked at the last place she had hidden it. I looked high, I looked low. I looked under the pillow. I looked in my crate. I looked in her pockets. Then Mom told me, “Kitchen.” I looked at her like she had lost her mind.

“Mom,” I said, “I’d think you lost my cookie.”

“I did, Sailor,” Mom answered. “I lost it in the KITCHEN.”

Light bulb.

Mom smiled. I got cookies.

Now, Mom hides my cookies in places I didn’t think we had places. Sometimes it takes me quite a bit of rug digging, pillow tossing, and toenail scrabbling to find it. She gives me fewer and fewer hints, too. She says this will be a fun game to play when the rains start and she can’t hide cookies outside. She says they disintegrate in the rain. I can’t imagine a cookie lying on the ground long enough to get to that point, but Mom is usually right.

She makes the cookies harder and harder to find. Yesterday, after a difficult game of Find the Cookie, my brain was quite drained. I took my cookie to my crate and fell asleep with crumbs still on my lips.

Mom smiled.

This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Bob Smith and is freely available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Choco_chip_cookie.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 2.5 license