Meet Floppy

This is his walking harness it helps him from running into things (mostly picnic tables).

Now you might be wondering why in the middle of my Glacier National Park posts I'm talking about my dog. It's because he plays an important role in our daily schedule and of course our Glacier schedule.

So here is Floppy (or Flop). He is approximately 13 years old. We found him when he was about 1. Someone dropped him off in our neighborhood when we lived in New Mexico. Animal Control tried to catch him, we tried to catch him, no luck. About day 5 of this we were driving back from the store and I had a bag of Cheeto puffs I was eating and we saw him laying in one of our neighbors yards. So we stopped and I threw a Cheeto to him. He LOVED it. So I threw another one, and another one, and another one all the way to our neighbors fenced in yard where we finally caught him. Flop was a wild child when he was young. Initially he HATED car rides, understandably since someone had clearly thrown him out of one in our subdivision. He also had tons of energy and would jump on our our couch backwards, it was impressive to see.

Now that was a long time ago and about 3 years ago we noticed he was slowing down and drinking a lot of water so we took him to the vet and discovered he was diabetic. Apparently diabetes in dogs is like type 1 in people. So for three years he has gotten shots twice a day 12 hours apart. I really can't believe it's been that long now that I type that. I also can't thank everyone enough for helping us out when we were both working. It's not easy to balance our schedules of flying and having someone home to give his shots. My mom has been an awesome help with this being on call if we were running late or honestly just dropping him off at her house for dogging sitting and shots while we were on the road. We also managed to find a great dog sitter for when we were all out of town on vacation. So this has been our daily life for 3 years.

About 3 months ago I noticed him slipping a little (not literally though his back end is pretty bad anymore) but he's probably about 80% blind now and his blood sugar is becoming harder to control, he's also getting a ton of unrainy tract infections. We have upped his medicine by a 1/3 in the last few months from where it was for almost three years. He's still hanging in there though and loves dinner time.

All this to say when we plan our day we plan it around his shots and being in Glacier was no exception, it actually worked to our advantage! Since we do Floppy's shots on what we call "Maddie time" which is central time that ended up being 5:30 am in Montana! Which I know seems crazy early (and I guess it was) but it allowed us to feed him/ give him his shot/ give him time to go outside and we could hit the road before almost everyone else. So we would go hike 5-6 miles in the (early) morning come back about 11 have breakfast/lunch then go out again in the afternoon. So while I promise my next posts will be on Glacier I figured I'd give you a heads up on why some of my pictures are so dark...it's because the sun was just coming up!

Floppys favorite thing to do.....Sleep!