Free Pattern!

The design I settled on is an extremely simple yet cute pattern that comes from Stitch11.com. A free crochet dog sweater pattern? Thank you, Stich11!

Two patterns are available in different sizes: the size XS dog sweater and a size S dog sweater. As written, the finished sweater measures about 12 inches from top to bottom. The neckline is about 9 inches in diameter so you can easily get it over your pup’s head. My dog is 6.5 lbs and I had to size down slightly to make the fit as snug as I wanted it. However, the designer indicates that the sweater is designed for dogs 5-10 lbs.

XS Dog Sweater

And the finished product? Et Voilà!

I sized down by casting on 32 and then increased to 36, then up to 38 for the main body once I joined the sides. The pattern is easy to customize. I needed to do that because Sunny has a tiny rump but a larger trunk. Most dog clothing fits her weirdly. So I was happy I could make her something myself instead of spending a ton on sweaters from the store that might not fit her well.

Amazon Came Through

Before I decided to crochet Sunny’s dog sweater, I bought this XS dog sweater from Amazon. (Full disclosure this is an affiliate link.) I love how it looks like a turtleneck and that it has a leash clip! It looks like it could be pulled out fairly easily so I will be careful using the leash clip.

However, even though I have a Prime subscription, the sweater won’t arrive until Thursday. With Georgia’s weather, we might be back in the 90s. So I pivoted and made the crochet dog sweater, which I like better, to be honest.

Crocheting is so wonderful, isn’t it? If I had cast on a dog sweater to knit I’d still have a mountain of stitches to go. Crochet comes together much more efficiently. I just love it! I crochet and post about it pretty often, and also post about my dog from time to time in other areas of my blog.

The post XS Dog Sweater for XS Sunny appeared first on Fae’s Journal.

How big are Toy Fox Terriers? Small and Dainty…

Toy Fox Terriers are small like Sunny, anywhere from 4 to 9 lbs. Sunny is 6.5 lbs so that fits. They are small but active dogs, meaning they’re inclined to sports and agility. Sunny has endless energy, even though she can chill out and take a good afternoon nap. Once she wakes up though, you better take her on a walk or she’ll be driving you round the bend with her energy. I also think Sunny could do agility training really well if it wasn’t so expensive. Why is it so expensive anyway?

Toy Fox Terrier’s Temperament

Toy Fox Terriers are terriers through and through, which means they are super aware and like to explore their environment. Sunny likes to sniff and examine everything when we take walks, so that’s spot on. She also has a high prey drive, so if she sees something she wants to chase it.

The Wikipedia article about Toy Fox Terriers’ temperament also describes a personality very, very much like Sunny’s.

Toy Fox Terriers According to Wikipedia

Toy Fox Terriers were used commonly in circus shows by clowns, and they are said to make great companions for owners with a good sense of humor.^[1] As a terrier breed, they are often active, though perhaps not as active as the Jack Russell Terrier, and are said to be well suited for older owners. They are quite trainable and often cited as making wonderful companions for people with disabilities. They are also very lovable and loyal to their owners. In addition, dogs of this breed tend not to bark very much if they are trained well.^[2]

Puppies.com has the following advice about Toy Fox Terriers

That’s Sunny!

Sunny is definitely all of those things and more. She loves to go on walks and play, she’s very high energy. Very intelligent and trainable, she has been quick to learn several commands that we’ve been working with her on like Lay Down, and Sit. She’s super goofy, such a playful little dog. Her fur is super shedy for a short haired dog and I need to comb her pretty often to get the shed off or I’ll be covered with white hairs.

Watchdog, TFT’s got that

Watchdog? Yeah that’s Sunny. She’ll be looking out the door and barking before I know anyone is even approaching the door. She loves being loving and affectionate. We are working on the barking, she likes to bark at dogs that walk by our house and while I think it’s good that she instinctively wants to guard the house, it can be excessive.

Barking yeah Toy Fox Terriers can bark…

She also has this super high pitched bark, I have deemed it her ‘excited’ bark that she only makes when she sees an animal she wants to chase, the animal has run away, and she feels like she is missing out on being able to chase it. It’s baby deer season in my area and it’s her absolute dream to chase a baby deer. Little does she know that those mama deer will stomp her if she got too close. We saw a possum the other morning and it was all I could do to keep her from shrilly barking like mad at 6:30 in the morning on our first walk.

Cat and Dog Friendly

She’s cat friendly enough. There are several semi-feral cats that hang around our neighborhood and she plays well with them because they’ll bop her if she gets too fresh with them. My indoor cat though, Sunny wants to play with her so bad but Elsa does not want to play at all. My 9 year old matron cat just hisses at her and runs away and doesn’t want anything to do with Sunny which sometimes results in Sunny chasing after her and Elsa hiding for a few hours. Sunny really just wants to be friends but Elsa is not on board with that.

She plays well with other dogs until she gets a toy she wants to hold onto and then some stubborn tug of wars can happen. She’s also obsessed with Yak Cheese so once she got her own Yak Cheese from a friend she was NOT friendly about potentially sharing said Yak Cheese with friend’s dog. Daisy had her own Yak Cheese but Sunny was not having anything to do with sharing her Yak Cheese.

Sources: Toy Fox Terrier Dog Breed Health and Care | PetMD | Toy Fox Terrier – Dog Breed Information

The post Toy Fox Terrier Dog Breed  appeared first on Fae’s Journal.

So from the title you can surmise that we had a health scare where my dog eats rat poison. Let’s have a story time, folks.

We drove down to Jacksonville Beach for a week long vacation on Friday, me, my son, one of his friends and our dog Sunny, a rat terrier mix of some sort. She’s too small to be full rat terrier, I think, as she’s just at 6.5 lbs, but she’s definitely mostly rat terrier.

The drive to Jacksonville Beach from Athens is not a bad drive and we made really good time. Yesterday was our first full day here and we got going early. I just got my dog in May, and am so in love with her. Sunny was awake at 6:00 and ready to go out on her first walk of the day. She likes to have at least three or four walks a day, the more the better with her, really. We watched the sunrise. When we got back I drank some tea and then went to take a shower.

Terrier Behavior

My dog is really a good girl but she has a propensity to get into things. She’s a terrier of some concoction, mostly Rat Terrier but probably some other things too. Her behavior is all rat terrier. She’s very curious and likes to get under things to sniff out potential vermin. It’s what the breed was bred to do, so it makes sense that she naturally gets into things. But sometimes that can be really bad.

When I got out of the shower she was so happy to present me with a green block that she’d found and subsequently eaten the corner off of. My first instinct was that it was rat poison, not that I have great familiarity with the stuff but it looked like the color of rat poison I’d seen before. It was big, though, like a block.

I asked my parents if they had rat poison traps out in the house. They didn’t know of any rat poison in their house. They had a rodent problem several years ago, but the company who came out had set traps instead of using rodenticide. They’ve had this house for more than a decade, so it might have fallen from the attic, or been under a piece of furniture that hasn’t moved since they moved it. Who knows really.

Normal Day

We went about our day. Sunny acted normal all day. Around 5:00 my son took Sunny on a walk. Just a few minutes into their walk he called me because Sunny had vomited twice. I circled back to worrying that the mysterious green thing she’d munched on and google image searched it and the worst scenario came true because it was indeed rat poison that she had ingested.

So what happens when your dog eats rat poison?

Someone who lives in my parent’s neighborhood works at First Coast Veterinary Specialists, a 24 hour Vet ER in Jacksonville Beach, FL and our first thought was to go to her house for a quick word and to see if she recommended we take Sunny in. I was already wanting to take Sunny to be seen but it was our first reaction to see what someone would say informally like that. She was very nice and highly encouraged us to take her regardless of the situation. We don’t know how much Sunny ate or how old the poison is, but it didn’t really matter.

So we got in the car and rushed to the vet. Luckily the Vet ER is right close to my parents house, like 0.6 miles close! We went inside and they suggested that I call the ASPCA Poison Control care line and complete a consultation with them. So I got on the phone right there in their waiting room and went through the consultation. They walked me through information about the three main types of rodenticide that are most common on the market and what potential decontamination protocols might look like for each of them.

Which kind of rat poison did your dog eat?

Since we do not have the packaging for the rat poison we cannot know for sure which sort of poison it is. It’s important to have the packaging so they can eliminate guess work, but in our case we don’t have it. The poison itself might have been a decade old!

Rodenticide is bad news, folks

So the vet errs on the side of caution and treats for all three major types. They are all pretty horrible, and I don’t agree with poison as a method of rodent control, personally. Quick death if any death is needed, is my point of view, so when a place has a rodent infestation I am all for quick trap death over slow poisoning because they all sound pretty horrible and inhumane.

Especially when one thinks about the same things happening to their beloved pets, I think it becomes easier to see how gruesome poisons are. Almost as bad a glue traps, which are incredibly inhumane and I am fully against as someone who has seen innocent snakes trapped in glue traps and painstakingly removed. Don’t use those, folks, really.

Dog Eats Rat Poison? Go to the vet

Anyway, Sunny got a full blood panel done, some anti-nausea medicine injected (the same that she was given after her spay only 11 days ago!), had activated charcoal administered and had subcutaneous fluids injected to make up for the dehydration from vomiting. We are monitoring her closely and taking her back to the vet for the next four days to recheck her bloodwork to monitor the levels of certain things in her blood. The vet was fairly sure that if by day 5 the levels are okay still we will be out of the woods.

This is terrifying as a new dog owner, but I am thankful the vets and the techs and everyone at First Coast Veterinary Specialists were so amazing and caring with us. Sunny came back after her bloodwork and injections with a spiffy new bandana that makes her look somehow even cuter than before and we are just watching her carefully for any symptoms of toxicity. We will take her back at 4pm today to get her second round of bloodwork done to monitor levels.

Keep us in your thoughts, she’s my baby!

The post Sunny’s Health Scare appeared first on Fae’s Journal.

Dog Ownership is Different

Dogs are intense. Dogs are harder to own than cats, which I have had since college. Cats meshed with my chill laissez-faire lifestyle. Had Sunny not arrived on my doorstep the last day of school in May, I wouldn’t have made the plunge to dog ownership at all.

I officially adopted her after exhausting all efforts to finding her previous owners. She wasn’t microchipped, but I posted on my personal Facebook and made a post on Nextdoor via Pawboost and PetFBI. I posted signs all over the neighborhood, went door to door to ask if they had seen this dog or knew where she belonged, and asked everyone I saw on walks if she was a familiar face among the dog owners in the neighborhood but she had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

She has settled in well here and me and my son are over the moon in love with her. She’s brought a joy to our lives that we needed and I just cannot believe how much a dog can change your life for the better.

There are mysteries I’ll never get answered about her life before she came to me, like why she didn’t know how to walk on a leash but was definitely cared for because she’s so gentle and sweet. She wasn’t spayed or microchipped but had been housetrained.

I do think someone dropped her off in my neighborhood the morning I found her, and it was a serendipitous moment that I ended up finding her!

Story time!

It was the last day of school, and my team had made end of the schoolyear t-shirts that we were all going to wear. I was so excited about the shirt, so much so that I laid it out the night before on a chair to sort of display it.

But being neurodivergent the next morning I completely forgot to put the shirt on and went to school in a different shirt! Upon arriving I saw everyone in their shirts and was so upset that I had forgotten mine.

My assistant principal is awesome though (now she’ll be my principal this coming school year!) and she told me I could run home and get it. The last day of school is really chill for the most part, and I live close to my school so I ran home. Funny enough, I almost decided to not bother going but a few teachers talked me into it. It was really cool that not only my team were wearing these shirts, a lot of other teams had ended up buying them and almost the whole school had them on!

An Amazing Confluence of Events

Honestly, there was an amazing confluence of events at play here because to this day I keep thinking about what would have happened had I a) not forgotten to wear the shirt and b) decided not to go home and change into it.

Because none of this would have happened! It really is sometimes a tiny, inconsequential decision that ends up making big changes in your life.

I had called my mom to chat and I’ll never forget the moment. Because once I came home, ran inside and threw on the shirt, I turned back around to leave and there on my porch is this dog! She was looking hopefully at me, like she’d seen me come home and ran up to greet me. And I said, “Oh who are you?” This lost, scared, and nervous dog grabbed onto my heart and held on tight. I was immediately in crisis mode and grabbed some ribbon from inside to slip through the collar she had on. She had a collar, but later we found that she was not microchipped, and didn’t have a rabies vaccination tag. Hoping to find someone looking for her, took her back outside. She looked like she’d just slipped out of someone’s house. There was no one looking for her.

Had to get back to work

I knew I had to get back to school quickly so I led this poor scared dog down the street and noticed right away that she didn’t know how to walk on a lead. Strange. So I scooped her up and ran down the street to a neighbor’s house. I had seen her with a dog vaguely the same size/shape as Sunny so I wondered if she belonged to her.

However, upon knocking I heard a dog barking from inside her house, so I knew the dog in my hands wasn’t her dog. I almost turned around and left because I’d never even spoken to this neighbor! She opened the door and we talked. Upon hearing that I was a teacher and needed to get back to work she agreed to watch the dog for the day. I promised her that I would come back after work and pick her up. Meeting her has also turned out to be an incredible boon as she is the best!

So having secured the dog for the day I went off to work. Throughout the day, I posted on Facebook and the lost pets sites. That afternoon, I returned prepared to pick her up. It was surreal, to be honest. My neighbor took her to a vet and checked for a microchip and did not find one and Sunny accompanied her to her volunteer bookstore job with her dog Rusty.

She’s Mine Now

That afternoon I took Sunny back to my house and we started our journey together. Again, if any of the small decisions made that morning had gone differently, I might not have found Sunny at all. That makes me so incredibly sad to imagine, and so thankful that everything came together the way it did to put her into my life when I needed her so much and didn’t even know it.

She is spayed and microchipped now, took care of that! I got her this doggie onesie to wear after her spay but it was too big, she looked like she had a dumpy diaper in it and it didn’t keep her from licking. But had I gotten the right size it would have been good!

Anyway, long post but once you become a dog owner you find yourself really involved in your dog! Update: While we were on vacation my dog ate rat poison! Read about that here!

The post Dog Things appeared first on Fae’s Journal.