I saw Django Unchained in the movie theater today, and the scene where three angry dogs kill a slave by ripping all his limbs off made me think it was time for a Molly update on the blog. The first thing you need to know is that Molly hasn’t yet ripped a person’s limbs off, and also, she’s not a racist dog. She’d just as likely rip a White, Asian or Mexican person limb-to-limb as she would a Black person.

Now the first thing people always want to know when it comes to any good Molly update is her size. I could tell you that we just weighed her yesterday and she came in at 76lbs. But that doesn’t really tell you how she compares to when we first got her or at any other milestone in her life. A smarter man than me could set up a professional-looking graph in Excel to show how her size has changed as she’s gotten older. A man of my average intellect opts for the handwritten graph:

Or, if numbers isn’t your game, this might work better for you.

Here’s what “Molly being held by Julie” looked like as a two-and-a-half-month-old puppy:

And here’s what “Molly being held by Julie” looks like as of January 9th (seven-and-a-half-month-old puppy):

A couple more points on Molly’s size:

• We’ve officially changed her name to “Clifford.” Please use her correct new name the next time you see her.
• If that extremely accurate graph is to be trusted, it seems like her growth rate is finally slowing down.
• This blog post is being dedicated to Julie’s formerly good back. Hopefully reading this post on her phone at the chiropractor’s tomorrow will cheer her up at least a little.

If you were only reading this to check in on Molly’s weight, you can stop now. For the rest of you, here are some more fun and/or alarming Molly tidbits for your reading pleasure:

-One thing we’ve been particularly pleased about in our five months with Molly is that she really hasn’t done any damage to any of our possessions. You always read these horror stories about the dog that eats all the contents of a trash can or an entire TV. But as happy as we’ve been about this, we’re also smart enough to realize she hasn’t destroyed anything because she’s really never had the chance. As a dog, when you spend every alone moment inside a crate and your Dad’s an unemployed writer who’s home 24/7, you really don’t get many chances to go to town on the prohibited household goods. So what happened on New Year’s Eve? Well, we went to a party until about 1am. When we came home, we put Molly on our bed to let her sleep with us for the night. She got restless at some point and decided to jump off the bed. Usually this wakes me up and I guide her into her crate for the rest of the night, but for some strange reason I was in a deeper state of sleep than usual that night. At 4am I woke up to find Molly innocently curled up on the living room couch, another favorite sleeping spot of hers. Of course all the innocence and “oh isn’t that the cutest!” feelings disappeared quickly when I looked on the ground and saw this crime scene:

A few more thoughts on those pictures:

• Julie says that was an expensive shoe. But when I asked her what we should do with the matching shoe that Molly didn’t eat, she said to throw it away. So expensive could those shoes really be?
• I really do think Molly’s happy with her life, but can we really be sure she wasn’t purposely whittling that brush handle down to a sharp point to use as a weapon on me and Julie?
• When we were at the Vet yesterday and they were trying to figure out what might be wrong with Molly’s stomach (more on that in a minute), they asked us several times if we were sure she couldn’t have gotten into something she shouldn’t have and swallowed something that could be blocking her digestive system. Somehow this entire New Year’s incident escaped our memory as we shook our heads and said there was no way she could have eaten anything off limits.

-Speaking of destroying things…Over the five months of having her, we’ve given Molly an array of toys (and a plethora…a plethora seems like a good word to describe the more than 30 toys Molly has at her disposal). In her first three-and-a-half months with us, Molly almost never destroyed any of her toys. Some of her older toys would inevitably get small holes in them from natural wear and tear, but she always seemed to play with them gently enough. But over these past seven weeks, Molly has turned into a homicidal maniac when it comes to her stuffed-animal toys. She’s out for blood and she’s taking no prisoners. Here are the toys she’s no longer allowed to play with because the risk of her demolishing them and eating all the stuffing is just too high:

And the close-up:

I’m pretty sure all the Toy Story characters would commit suicide if they saw Molly in action for 10 seconds.

-And here’s Molly’s new, smaller array of toys to choose from:

Not nearly as exciting as the stuffed animals at times, but my dog budget doesn’t include “replace decimated stuffed animal daily” as a line item.

-So I mentioned something being wrong with Molly’s stomach. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say Molly hasn’t really been “regular” for the past six weeks. The beginning of this situation coincided with a two-day period where Molly refused to eat the dog food that she’d been happily devouring for the better part of four months up to that point. I seriously thought she was just playing a game of psychological warfare with us and was holding out for better food (i.e. human food). But the Vet’s theory was that Molly’s puppy food might be suddenly too rich for her and it was time to switch to an adult food. But before we could do that, we had to get her back to normal again by putting her on a bland diet of wet food (basically setting the reset button on her stomach). Long story short, we’ve been playing around with so many different foods for the past month that we could literally run a black market pet store out of our apartment:

And of course right before that first Vet visit where they told us to take her off the puppy food, we had just bought a new 30lb bag of the damn puppy food (pictured in the unmarked plastic container above). So if anyone wants to buy about 27.5lbs of puppy food, I’m willing to make a deal. I will not give it to you for free because I’m bitter. I’d rather throw it in the trash.

-Oh and the latest update is that the Vet no longer thinks the stomach issues are related to the type of food Molly’s eating. No, now they think it could be a bacteria/parasite/alien species living in her intestines. So on top of the food surplus, we could now start shipping most dog meds to you as part of our black market operation:

We’re one more Vet visit away from having to get one of those pill organizers that says all the days of the week on it that old and/or pregnant people use to keep track of their med schedules. Our puppy is an 88-year-old woman.

-And finally, let’s end on a lighter note. If by some magical way Molly was able to talk to us for just 15 seconds, saying only one thing and never being able to talk again, I’d like to think she’d spend that time reassuring Julie that she’s never once been cold when Julie thinks she’s cold. She would say, “Look, I don’t need blankets, extra cuddling or a space heater pointed directly at me. It’s science, Mom. My body temperature is three degrees higher than yours. If you’re not cold, rest assured I’m not cold. I probably should have spent this time telling you guys what it means when I bark, pull on my leash or chew through my toys, but I just needed to clear this temperature thing up once and for all.”

So that’s the latest in Molly’s life. If you’ll excuse me, Julie just yelled from the bedroom to bring her all the blankets we have in the house.