Sunday mornings with Cooper

The face Cooper loves to give you when he is at his worst

I like to dedicate a lot of my weekend time to Cooper. On Saturday, however, the weather was pretty crappy so I decided to stay inside; meaning Cooper too was cooped up (like my play on words) in the house all day. To make it up to him, on Sunday I decided to take him all the way to the dog park on the schuylkill (about 1.3 miles from our house). This place is the Paris of dog parks. The entire place is made of turf and is surrounded by beautiful benches and landscaping. Cooper loves this park because it is bigger and he gets to play with a lot of dogs (since he isn't preoccupied with eating mulch). Anyway, we don't normally go here because it is pretty far and because it is filled with snoody people. But for Cooper, I swallow my pride and take a few dirty looks so he can have a good time.

So we get to the park and we already have one strike against us because Coop is a mutt. Only purebreds are worthy of that park in some people's minds. To make it worse, as soon as we enter the park Cooper runs up to two puppies who are playing and begins his "play with me!" bark. Now what you may not get is that Cooper will bark for 10 minutes strait if a dog won't pay attention to him. So as soon as he started barking, I ran over to him and tried to grab him. Now Cooper is very used to this and proceeded to run in circles around these dogs barking with me chasing behind him like an idiot. Of course the tight assed people of the elite dog park were snickering at the plebeian being outsmarted by a 6 month old, super annoying puppy. Luckily, Cooper made a wrong move and I was able to grab him by the collar and get him away from the action.
Things got better at this point and he found a fellow 6 month old puppy to wrestle with, and all was well for the next 10 minutes. Then, the owner of Cooper's new friend took out the leash. I wanted to cry. Cooper was about to be lonely again, and a lonely Cooper is a loud Cooper. Fortunately, another puppy was interested in my mutt. She was about double Cooper's weight, coming in at a whopping 80lbs at 7 months. Nevertheless, Coop held his own. They played for about 5 minutes, and then the worst thing happened. Another dog tried to take Cooper's new friend. Cooper broke into a barking fit. He barked his new friend right onto a bench. With his persistent "pay attention" woofs, his giant friend became more and more afraid. She backed up and right on over the back of the bench. At this point he decided she was in too much of a predicament to go anywhere with another dog,  but he still needed to chase away his competitor; a 130 pound Great Dane. He started jumping at the other dog's face nipping and barking him right into a corner. I was mortified as people were pointing at him asking "who's dog is that?". As I ran over to get him, things got worse. His super nose caught a scent and ran full speed over to a girl holding a coffee cup. Of course, Cooper jumped right up to her and knocked her coffee everywhere. To make things worse, she was the owner of the Great Dane he was tormenting.

At this point, I was so tired of chasing him that I just stopped and screamed "Cooper come!!". Of course, he came prancing over and sat down right in front of me with his tongue hanging happily out of his mouth. I put his harness on, and shamefully left the dog park.
On our way home, we walk by Doggie Style, Cooper's favorite pet store. I needed a couple of things there so I decided to stop in. Of course everyone was fussing over Cooper and his "perfect spot" on his head. "Oh he's such a good puppy!" "You are so lucky to have such a well-behaved dog at his age."Yeh ok, I thought.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we did a whole lot of shopping and trying things on. Cooper also got his dagger nails clipped since my poor legs couldn't take any more cuts from him scratching me (and of course the groomer came back telling me how he was one of the best puppies she had ever dealt with). I got him a ton of treats for being such a good puppy in the store. But my favorite item of all was his new coat. I normally don't think that dogs need coats since they naturally have their own, but Cooper tends to shake when we are outside too long, so I bought him one. Anyway, for the first few blocks he acted like he didn't even know there was anything on him. I was so pleased. I had thought he would rip it right off, but maybe this coat didn't bother him. Well it didn't... until we hit Broad Street. As we are crossing the busy 6 lane street that only gives pedestrians 15 seconds to cross, Cooper whips around and grabs his coat. He proceeds to lay down and start rolling around. I could see through windshields, motorists chuckling at my "adorable" puppy. After a few failed attempts to coax him up, I decided we were running out of time, and I dragged him on his stomach the rest of the way. Everyone around me was laughing; I'm pretty sure even William Penn on top of city hall cracked a smile at that scene. To be honest, I couldn't even be mad at him because it was just so like Cooper to do this. And honestly, it was pretty cute.

Cooper in his new coat

Anyway, of course as soon as we got onto the other side of the street Cooper forgot about his coat and started walking normally. Luckily, we made it home with no further incidents.
After giving him a treat I bought him (which he probably didn't deserve), he curled up and is now happily passed out by my side.
The saddest part of this story is that I am such a sap for Cooper that we will be back at the dog park (unless we are banned), and we will have the same experience again. Oh well, people will do anything for their dogs right??