When you work at a home office you have to learn a certain amount of discipline so that you can get any kind of work accomplished during the day. That is especially true if you are the primary caregiver to a small child. I imagine that's true if you are primary caregiver of any sort, but I haven't got there yet.

There are some days when even focus and personal discipline are not enough to carry you through to getting work done during the day. This was one of those days. Combine a teething 10 month old with a sick dog and that spells a recipe for busy day, just not a productive one.

This is mainly a story about our dog. Timber is about 9 years old and is generally a very good dog. However he seems to have always had "eating issues".

From the beginning we fed him the most natural and whole foods we could find. You would think he would appreciate that, but every few weeks to a month or so he would just decide that he didn't like that food anymore and wouldn't eat it. Then he would go on a binge of eating his own poo. Or maybe just puke on the carpet at a random moment.

This would motivate us to try a different flavor or conisistency of food for a while. Over the years we've done dry, water with dry, adding soup to dry, canned food, canned and dry together, raw food, and all manner of table foods. The table foods are the only ones that seemed to work best consistently for him, but we didn't want to get to the point where we were setting another place at the table for the dog. And you don't always want the dog to have what your having anyway. Pizza or Mexican night would likely not be so good on his digestive system, and even less welcome on the carpet.

So recently when he decided to stop eating again, and then puking whatever we did get him to eat we figured it was just another episode of the dog's picky eating habits and sensitive stomach. After a week or so of trying to get him to keep something down he was starting to get pretty thin.

The vet checked him out, but didn't find anything obviously wrong with him other than he had gotten pretty skinny. So now we've had x-rays and barium studies done. Apparently there is something blocking the entry from his stomach to the rest of his digestive system.

At least this time there is a physical reason for the problem.

Now we start down the road of finding out what it is and what can be done about it. We found him as a stray when he was only a few weeks old, so we've kind of saved him one already from an uncertain future.

Hopefully we can save him again.