What About the Children?

Even though I'm not going to be kir-ing it daily, I still have a backlog of photos. This one was homemade, and marks Nick's and my first time entertaining (if only slightly) at our apartment in Paris. A few of my Middlebury friends came over for apéritifs and munchies before four of us headed out for mediocre tapas with the three dogs we had between us.

Speaking of dogs, we came over here with two, and the question of what their lives are going to look like here has been evolving. Back in Brooklyn, we were rather particular about what they ate. We looked for human-grade ingredients, and had read or been told that at least the first three or four should be items that we would eat--meats, for example, as opposed to meat by-products or bone meal. We ended up settling on Merrick Before Grain dry food mixed with such flavors of their wet food as Thanksgiving Day Dinner, Wing-a-Ling, and...trying to remember...maybe Cowboy Cookout? I like to think that there is a difference between a pet or a child's being spoiled (which literally means that something is rotten, right? that it's gone bad?)--which, to my mind, implies behaving in an entitled manner--and being treated well...but regardless, we may be walking the line with these two. Anyway, we arrived in Paris with very little of the dry food we had brought on vacation and none of the wet. And so it was time to either order more Merrick from the U.S. and pay for costly shipping (because that stuff's heavy!), or find a French alternative. After visits to a couple of grocery stores and three pet stores, I think I've found a mixture that we can all be happy with. I hesitate to feed Graham and Winnie anything that can be purchased at the supermarket, but given that the people food here is mostly better than what you can find at Gristedes or Food Emporium at home, maybe it's the same for the critters. At any rate, I found a dry food at Shopi (one of the supermarket chains here) whose first ingredient was chicken, rather than one grain or another, and have been switching off among several wet foods: one made by Pedigree from Shopi, an all-natural German one called Almo Nature that we found at Miaou Waou, a pet store in the 11th arrondissement, and a third one, also from Miaou Waou, called Nature's Harvest, which comes in frozen-dinner-type trays and says it should be used--even if refrigerated--within 24 hours. This means that we will be either: a) throwing out a lot of dog food, because our two are small and can't possibly take in a whole tray of that stuff in a day without dire consequences in the output department, or b) serving them vittles that, by Nature's Harvest's exacting standards, are past their prime. Time will tell, as we're just nearing the end of our first 24 hours after opening.

It seems that people also walk their dogs differently here. In New York, where you're generally dealing with sidewalks rather than yards, the rule of thumb is to try not to have your dog pee on anything valuable or right in front of somebody's door, and always pick up #2. I was told before my arrival that there would be a great deal of the aforementioned #2 on the sidewalks of Paris, and also that there are dedicated vehicles, called Mobicrottes, whose drivers tool around town removing it. I haven't seen all that much of the former, and none of the latter. I do believe that we are the only dog-owners in Paris who walk around with plastic-bag caddies on their leashes, picking up after their furry little ones--or, at the very least, I haven't seen anybody else doing it. If somebody straight-up tells me not to clean up after them, I'll probably stop, but until then, it seems wrong not to do it. It also seems that people actually walk their dogs in the street here. We're working on this. Graham and Winnie are fairly sidewalk-oriented, and so sometimes it involves a little tug on the leash, when they're wearing one, and on the contrary, when they go au naturel, it can be a challenge to get them out of the street when a car approaches. I should probably always have them on leash, but as a lot of French dogs aren't, I'm a fan of the sense of freedom that accompanies letting them do their own thing a little bit.

And then there's the question of childcare. Because we're ridiculous, we had a dog nanny back in New York. She would pick the kids up in the morning, hang out with them at her house during the day, walking them regularly, and then bring them home in the afternoon. Our pups are crate-trained, and so when we're not at home, they hang out in a cage-type den, rather than being loose in the house, where they could get into things that could be harmful to them (or soil things that could be of value to us). Having lost our first dog to chocolate consumption, this seems reasonable to us, and so the dog nanny situation came from not wanting to have them crated all day. But Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the kind of world where, if you place an ad on Craigslist for a dog nanny, ten people make appointments to be interviewed, show up with references, and you can be pretty well assured of finding a worthy candidate among them. This may be a corollary to the fact that Park Slope is a world of yuppies with misplaced priorities, but so be it; it's worked for us. Craigslist Paris, on the other hand, has about five postings under Pet Services. So this will be an interesting figuring-out process. Once Nick is back from picking grapes in Beaujolais, we'll at least have more hands on deck. But for now, I've been forced to crate them in my absence, particularly as we're staying in an apartment full of rugs and little doo-dads that could be damaged by a rambunctious puppy. We arrived with a small travel crate that we brought with us on vacation, but its front flap zips shut, and one or both of the dogs--my money's on Graham, the more separation-anxious of the two--has unzipped it while I've been out. In fact, I came home the other day to find him standing on our dining room table. Yikes. I have an order placed with Amazon for a larger crate with a real, latching door, but in the meantime...for their (his) next trick, they actually ripped the flap open, reducing the crate to a silly little joke. So for the last couple days, the crate and pups have been in the petit French toilet room--see, it is good for something!--which, thankfully, has a real door as well, and that seems to be a reasonable solution while we wait for the Amazon box to show up. Stay tuned.

Update #1: Tossed the Nature's Harvest and started a new can of Pedigree; didn't want to deal with the potential fallout, as it were, of expired dog food.

Update #2: Right after I posted this (which was Saturday, even though it says Tuesday at the top--it records the day of the first "save as draft," as opposed to the day you publish), I took the pups out and, lo and behold, saw a man picking up his dog's beezwax with a plastic bag. From the sidewalk, no less. Viva la globalization!