Little Boy Blue and His Book Fetish

Every morning, I rise at five a.m. to let our three boxers outside to pee after a long night being couped up in the house. This morning, I was too tired to drag myself out of bed so I nagged my hubby to get up and let the dogs out for me. After numerous slaps on his shoulder with the backside of my wrist, along with a promise of some hanky panky later that morning, he finally got out of bed at five-twenty-two. Sleepily my hubby plodded through the dark house, opened the screen door, and returned to bed.

I arose at seven a.m. and fixed the dogs breakfast. Even as early as seven, the Texas humidity began to seep into our house, so I stepped outside to pull the door closed. What I saw on the back porch raised my blood pressure thirty points. There on the concrete step was the jacket flap of Eleanor & Park (at least my book was safe) by Rainbow Rowell.

Immediately, I knew the culprit was our newly adopted pound puppy Blue. He's a three-year-old boxer and, as any boxer owner can tell you, boxers are troublemakers until they're about five. When Blue saw me bring in the jacket sleeve he put himself in self-imposed time out.

The rest of the morning went swimmingly, I thought, until my fourteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, went looking for her book by John Green titled The Fault in Our Stars. Upon further inspection, we found the YA fiction novel laying in the side yard with the front cover torn off and the first hundred pages pock-marked with canine bites.

It took Lucy all day to forgive Blue as he shadowed around her feet. Lucy was upset because she suffers with word/sentence tracking issues and dysgraphia. She's only read one other book cover-to-cover (The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum) by herself, and that was in the summer before seventh grade.

Lucy was proud of herself because she had just a few more chapters untill she'd finish The Fault in Our Stars, which she was determined to finish before the movie adaption will be released in a couple of weeks.

A side note:  Lucy's auditory skills are exceptional and she reads through audiobooks, acting out the facial expressions and gestures the second words are expelled from car/stereo/ear bud speakers. Watching her listen is always entertaining. Currently, her favorite author is John Green and she listened to An Abundance of Katherines and Looking for Alaska in one sitting--that's six audio CDs (90 minutes each) per book. 

Back to Blue... Since we have motion sensor cameras around our home, we rewound the tape to catch the criminal in the act. From 5:59 a.m. to 6:09 a.m. there was Blue on Candid Camera. First, he circled the book she left of the couch, trying to decide what would be the best way he could get a hold of it. Next, we watched as he stood on his hind legs and stretched his neck just enough to snag the book in his jowls. 

One-by-one each motion camera he passed shows the book in his mouth. Once he knew he's safe on the side of the house, he gently set the book on the grass, nudged the cover open with his nose, and began to enjoy every word.

We copied the ten minutes of footage from the security DVR onto a flash drive, but we weren't able to make it compatible with Microsoft Media Player or condense the file small enough to post to YouTube. However, I hope you can see from the photos above how much our Little Boy Blue enjoys a good book.

Photos of Blue and our other boxers are posted on a blog post a few months back.