When Generosity Meets Gluttony

Liam and Seamus are so excited when their cousins William and Elise come to visit.  It is a long and painful drive from their house to ours, so visits only happen a couple of times a year.  However, this makes them even more anticipated events.   Liam and Seamus love the opportunity to share their farm adventures with William.  A few visits ago, they took him for a Charlie ride - an adventure that I think William very much regretted once seated on Charlie's back.

This visit, William was fascinated by Seamus' morning chore of feeding Charlotte and Emily their breakfast.  As Liam and Seamus get bigger, we have been working with them to adopt certain household and farm chores as their own.  For example, both boys are now supposed to make their beds each morning and put their dirty clothes in the laundry hamper - this does, in fact, happen more often than not.  Liam is also responsible for feeding the fish five pellets each morning.  Meanwhile, we have trained Seamus to feed each dog 1/3 of a cup of dog kibble for breakfast.

In our household, it is important to know who feeds the dogs because they are super tricky, especially Charlotte.  She sees everyone as a potential sucker and will whip out her puppy dog eyes while running back and forth to point at her food bag.  It is the doggy equivalent of "please, please feed me.  I am so hungry.  Here is my food.  Please put some in my dish. Please, please, PLEASE!"

Having seen how easy it was for Seamus to feed Charlotte and the immense gratitude she showered on him, William was hooked.  Once everyone was otherwise occupied, he toddled back into the mudroom and scooped cup, after cup, after cup of kibble into a waiting Charlotte's bowl.  Charlotte (having already eaten breakfast, of course) played the part of the glutton perfectly.  She gobbled up this unexpected and immensely pleasing shower of food as fast as she could.  By the time Auntie Megan noticed what was afoot, Charlotte had likely eaten a week's worth of dog kibble.   Her stomach was as hard as a rock.

Now, the trouble is that eating dog kibble makes the dogs thirsty.  Water, unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, makes the kibble pieces expand.  Charlotte's overfilled stomach simply could not expand any further and thus, she spent the next several hours regurgitating all of the dog food that she had so eagerly gobbled down.  Puke patrol was necessary to clean up the aftermath of William's generosity and Charlotte's gluttony.  Charlotte also badly needed a bath to rid her of the stench of dog vomit in her schnauzer beard.  Let this be a reminder to us all - everything in moderation, my friends.