There’s nothing more special than the relationship between a little girl and her pup! From the first day we brought Baby H home, we wanted to foster a close bond between her and our dog Charlie. And, as you can see, over the past year we’ve been lucky enough to see their relationship grow!

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Baby H loves her “puppy” and Charlie is very loving with her and protective. He always worries when she is doing something new – the first time we did tummy time with Baby H, Charlie almost had a panic attack seeing her on the floor. He had a very judgmental look on his face, is if we were being neglectful parents!

But in the past couple of months, we haven’t been very good dog parents. Charlie has never been fed “people food” beyond carrots, and instead sticks to his (crazy expensive and fancy) kibble. However, recently Baby H has entered into the “throw every piece of food on the ground” phase. While it was frustrating for us trying to encourage her to actually eat her food, we did chuckle at first about the fact that Charlie was becoming our living vacuum cleaner. All of a sudden he was sampling toast, pancakes, broccoli, sweet potato…the list goes on and on.

When we’d take Baby H out of her high chair, Charlie would swoop in and (literally) pick up the pieces. And while we knew, in the long run, it wasn’t an ideal scenario, we just went with it because that was just easier than dealing with the situation – locking Charlie in a different room while Baby H ate, or training him to sit there and not feast on her leftovers were far more work than letting him eat whatever was on the floor. In essence, we got lazy.

And then, last weekend we noticed an odd lump on Charlie’s head. We had absolutely no clue what it was. As we were consulting Dr. Google trying to figure out what it was, we started seeing more of them on his head. And then his back. And then all over his adorable, skinny little legs. Our poor Charlie was covered in hives! Yes, apparently dogs can break out into hives just like you and me.

After learning some tips online for how to deal with the situation at hand, we gave Charlie a cool bath, which brought the hives down for about an hour. Afterwards, Charlie vomited all over our kitchen and continued to dry heave off and on for about an hour. Mr. H ran out to the drugstore at 11pm and picked up liquid Benadryl. Fortunately, the Benadryl brought the hives down and seemed to provide Charlie some relief. But he was definitely upset and scared from what had been happening to his body and, for the first time ever, didn’t take us up on our offer to sleep in our bed (a huge treat for Charlie). It was so sad!

We thought about anything and everything Charlie might have gotten into that could have caused such a huge reaction. We first noticed the hives at about 8:30pm – a good 2 hours after Baby H had dinner (hives generally crop up within 30 minutes of exposure to an allergen). There was no evidence of him having gotten into anything else in our home. So, we have to assume that he found a late night snack sitting on or around her highchair. And the only food she’d had that day that would have been new to Charlie were strawberries (which I’ve now read can be a pretty big dog allergen).

Whether or not Charlie ate some of Baby H’s food that caused the allergic reaction, or got into something else, this was a huge wakeup call for us. While we love Charlie and he’s a very important part of our family, we weren’t treating him like he is. It’s our job to keep Baby H happy and healthy and the same goes for Charlie! He relies on us to make important decisions about his well-being and in turn we rely on him to give us lots of cuddles and be a good big (puppy) brother to Baby H.

Right now, our lives are as chaotic as ever and Baby H still loves dropping food off the side of her high chair. We do our best to keep Charlie out of the room during a lot of meals, but that’s not a permanent solution. We need to work at training him not to clean up after her. And once she starts to understand a little bit better, we will need to work with her on not feeding the dog (easier said than done!). I’m just relieved that Charlie’s health wasn’t seriously compromised and that we have the opportunity to change our habits before Charlie and Baby H picked up permanent bad habits!

Does your dog “clean up” after your LO? Do you try and discourage the behavior or enjoy not having to do the cleanup?