Living with Chico has helped me develop routines. Dogs, I learned, like routine. As soon as I wake up, we go outside because Chico hasn’t had access to his bathroom for eight or ten hours and fair is fair. Then I make some tea and do my yoga. When we first stared this program, I had to give Chico a bone while I did my yoga or he would be nuzzling me to play, or sticking his nose inside my child’s pose to lick my face. Presumably this is because in his prior life, whenever anyone got down on the floor, it was to interact with him. A nice chewy bone would then, and still will, keep him busy while I do my thing.

I usually give Chico a chewy treat/bone of some kind late in the evening; he brings it up on the bed when we go to bed, but he doesn’t chew it. In the morning, after I get the tea started, I roll out my mat and say “Yoga! Time for yoga!” and Chico goes to the bedroom, hops up on the bed and gets his bone from the previous evening, which he chews on his living room dog bed while I seek strength, flexibility, and peace of mind through a 20 minute routine of stretching, twisting, and controlled breathing.

Last night he didn’t eat his dinner, so no bone. Then, this morning, I gave him his dinner back, figuring he’d eat that instead of chewing a bone. Oh no. Morning is for bones, not dog food. After looking around the whole house for a bone he might have stashed someplace, Chico started taking toys out of his toy basket until he got to a generally under-appreciated rubber bone that is strung with rawhide stripping. In the absence of bully stick, lamb trachea, freeze-dried chicken neck, or other spoiled dog chewy, it turns out that

this is just fine.

Sadly for Chico, he got started with it rather late in my routine, and he refuses to chew the bone after I get up from the mat, so he got a bit short changed this morning. I’ll have to take some steps to do something else interesting today to make up for it.