We live in a flat

Many Adults, 1 Boy & 1 Dog's Montessori Life in a Singapore flat

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Author: weliveinaflat Page 26 of 31

Cosying up the bare walls of our flat

This blog is titled “we live in a flat”, so finally a post about the flat!

We moved in only a year ago, and most of our efforts were more on making the space work with functional pieces that are aesthetically pleasing, rather than decor for decor’s sake. We didn’t get an interior designer in order to save cost. It turned out the fengshui master we hired to placate our superstitious parents had his own opinions when it came to our interior decor. So yes, you could call him the interior designer :P

For instance, Mr Fengshui Master said for the bedroom that we needed to have two horses running towards the balcony door and yet, at the same time their legs must be on the ground. @_@ I don’t believe anyone manufactures running horse figurines that have their four feet planted to the ground, if you know what I mean. The search continued. We installed two picture ledges in preparation for the miracle running horses. In the end, I gave up and did up two running horses on the laptop, printed and framed it. One framed picture looked lonely, so I have another of our wedding photo next to it. We further personalised the room with our initials and that’s about it for the room decor. It’s a comfortable room, with its clean lines and calming colours.

The living room is Donna’s main area of activity. This room has not escaped Mr Fengshui Master’s dictate either.

This is the wall where you should place your TV. This is where all the wealth will flow, he said, you need to put some form of vessel here with a small mouth to collect the wealth.

You know Mr Fengshui Master was using his eyes when he said that. The TV point is right there on that wall. But you know what, it’s almost thoughtful of Mr Fengshui Master to do that. We have a friend who had to relocate his TV point from one wall to another just because his Fengshui Master said so while intimating this would ensure a baby in the near future versus no baby if he did not do so.

And since the black TV is stark against the white of the wall and the furniture, we decided to follow the picture wall trend/fad/whatever you call it. Only, we are slowly growing it. There isn’t really a specific theme or colour scheme for the pictures, besides the consistent use of black frames. Just a random collection of print, wallpaper sample, postcard and photos we collected as we move along with life. Eventually I would like to incorporate our travel photos in there.

The latest addition is Donna’s picture, with some Donna pin badges from the shelter sale. The frames resting on the TV console helped to hide the electrical extension points and cords placed directly behind them :D

Turn left and we are at the entrance of the flat. You needed a clock or a mirror here (the wall facing the front door), something with reflective glass, Mr Fengshui Master informed us. A clock at the entrance wasn’t useful for us, so we elected to clad half the wall in mirrors. A set of three vertical mirrors were bought from Ikea. They were an affordable solution. After some experimentation, we hung those mirrors upside down so that the etched image casts a floral shadow on the adjacent wall when reflecting the spotlight. I love the effect. It’s my own little light garden canopy just before I step into the heart of the flat. :)

There’s more things than flies to bug a person with a curious dog

I knew you were trouble when you walked in…– Taylor Swift

Music dogs and kids shouldn’t sing when their humans/moms are around ;P

Anyway, the recent weekends were busy for us with various medical, family and other commitments that we were not able to find the time to take Donna to the dog park. As a result, Donna hadn’t had the chance to be off leash and let loose somewhere outside for quite some time.

But we always made sure she gets her everyday walk at least once a day. The other morning at the park we saw a squirrel and a pigeon around the same tree and I stopped to take a picture. Unfortunately by the time I clicked, the squirrel is plastered to the tree and the pigeon was on the other side of the tree so… well, can you spot them?

And as I was amusing myself with my camera phone, Donna was sitting by my side, and a man walked by with his beautiful black dog. And that black dog was pulling and prancing around even as the man continued walking. And the most amazing thing? Donna remained sitting with her loose leash!


Picture: Pretty, if restive, pure black dog. Yes I sneaked a picture, but their not identifiable anyway :P so it hurts nobody!

We continued our loop around the park when it struck me that there was something new near the fenced enclosures that I don’t believe were there before! Ok, they were just “pick up your dog poop signs”. But for the longest time I was lazily wondering what the fenced enclosure was for.

And since there was no other signage identifying the use for the enclosure, I took it that I could bring my dog inside and just give her the luxury of running free on her temporary private grass patch for a while.

Although I start to get some misgivings within 5 seconds of getting in there. For one, the gates were designed to be latched from the outside and there was no hole for one’s hand to go through to comfortably latch the gate from the inside. So yes, we left the  two gates unlatched.

Two, for an empty enclosure, this place is surprisingly full of flies! and red ants.

Three, Donna started sniffing the unknown bone like things sticking out of the ground. I kicked one and it broke and I still don”t know what they are. Some form of fungus maybe. But given my dog’s penchant of suddenly deciding to perform certain hazardous taste tests, one can’t be too careful.

Four, the remnants of a large tree could have been interesting, except that it was crawling with termites.

She didn’t take the opportunity to run much, being more interested in sniffing out the new place. But we did have to run once we got out of the fenced enclosure, just to shake off the flies.

The good news was Donna returned home with no ticks or other such parasites, the bad news for her was we showered her thoroughly anyway. Muahahaha!

Toilet training and voice-sensitive dogs

When we were first introduced to Donna, we were told that she was toilet trained. Really? She certainly had a good time on the kitchen rug rather than the newspapers in the toilet. We slowly worked on getting her on the newspapers and for a while, we thought she got it until she went back to the kitchen rug again. It was a minor episode, a small blip in middle of the regular blops when she did use the newspaper. But perhaps because she largely did it outside, the newspaper training was maybe not as reinforced as we would like it to be. Result? There is always a potential of an accident somewhere else in the house.

So rather than solely rely on our, erm, not so perfect training the humans decided they needed to train themselves to (1) stop having rugs and (2) get use to the inconvenience of the child gate blocking entry to the kitchen. Ah yes, a sad day for human autonomy. The dog trained us instead :P


Picture above: One of Donna’s favourite things to do at home is to flop in front of the child-gate in hopes of a treat or two from the kitchen.

When is Donna likely to do it inside? Well, there was a bit of the time when she was still adjusting to living inside a house where people come and make noise outside the door and ring the doorbell. She would rush to the door and then rush to the toilet to pee on the newspapers in excitement. Thankfully, people coming to the door is a phenomenon that is growing passe by the second. She doesn’t get so excited that she needed to pee anymore.

But close to dawn this morning there was a pretty big thunder storm and I predicted to Mr P that he would find pee and poop when he went out to check on her. Surprisingly, the newspapers were clean. She didn’t do it?


Pictured above left: Donna’s private toilet, including her personal shower cubicle complete with bath stuff.
Pictured above right: The scene of the crime!! Now cleaned up.

She did, but by the front door of the house. On the floor where her water bowl usually sits on a rug, was now a few tiny islands of shit on a lake of yellow pee. :( Somehow she had managed to push the water bowl and the cheap rug to the side but the rug that had survived all the other rugs we got rid of, finally succumbed to the deluge. My best guess is that by instinct the dog went to pee and poop there because of the presence of the rug when it got too excited, perhaps because it was closer in proximity to her bed than the newspapers in the toilet. I also wonder if perhaps the thunderstorm made the toilet drafty and the newspapers flap around so that she was hesitant to go on the newspapers. I have no real way of verifying though.


Picture: Donna fidgeting joyfully in front of the rug before it met its accidental demise.

I think I’ve grumbled on this blog more than once that clean up is a pain. It is also something that I’ve a lot of practice and try to do it robotic-ally now. Dump the crap in a plastic bag, soak the pee with kitchen towel, wipe dry and spray the area liberally with a solution of white vinegar. Wait. Wipe dry. I look at the yellow stains in the grout and hope that there is not too much work ahead still.

But hey, instead of reinforcing that negative attitude, it occurred to me that it was lucky we kept all the room doors closed. It would have been worse had Donna taken it into her head to go into one of the rooms and eliminated on the useless omg-you-can’t-get-it-wet-or-it-will-pop laminate wood flooring that the flat came with.

As for Donna, she was the usual carefree, omg-I-am-so-happy-to-see-you dog until we discovered her treasure by the front door. Then she went into her guilty and deferential pose. Not that we would do anything to her. I had read before that dogs can’t connect punishment to their misdeed if it was after the fact. But there was a point in time where we were both very sick and the dog kept peeing where she should not and one just couldn’t help feeling very helpless and upset that I blew a fuse and screamed at her. She went into the down position, tummy flat on the floor, looking away from me and went very still for a really long time. And no, the undesired peeing behaviour did not go away. So what I ended up with was one very scared dog who continued doing things that made me mad after the scolding. It had the potential to downward spiral into a negative cycle which wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

So after that experience which showed that Donna was voice-sensitive, I never screamed at her again. I do ignore her, more to keep my own emotions in check so that we can maintain a relative calm in the house. Not all dogs react the same to raised voices, it was interesting for me to learn that from the crazydoglady that Willy talks back when they raise their voice at him.

Have you ever raise your voice at your dog? And how did it respond?

Some dogs watch TV, not Donna

The rain kept us in the house for the day. Mr P got an Yiruma playlist playing on our TV as we bustled in the kitchen making a simple lunch for ourselves. Our dog was, of course, at her usual spot by the child gate snoozing, ready to blink awake at any prospect of food. Yup, she did well despite her general fear of thunder.

It was all very calm and domestic really, like the gentle, repetitive, easy on the ear music that is Yiruma. I wonder if the music makes our dog calmer too.

Yesterday night was movie night. We rented Argo. Our dog was never interested in the TV, preferring to snooze at times on the floor and then on her bed and then back on the floor again. Yes, repetitive like Yiruma.

Argo was a good choice for a cheap, stay at home movie night. There was no stunning visual effects that demanded the need to catch it in a theatre, 3D or not. It was a interesting film, although not as exciting as a full-on action flick. In a way it plays like a repetitive Yiruma tune – the Canadian ambassador’s house, the hotel, the Canadian embassador’s house again. It took a bit of repetitive detail to chisel away the rough edges to fine-tune the suspense that builds into the final play for freedom at the airport. I thought it worked. I didn’t fall asleep. I stayed engaged the whole way.

I never learnt to play the piano so I wouldn’t exactly appreciate the technicalities involved in an Yiruma piece. It was nice, easy listening and unlike Argo, it did gently lull me into a quiet afternoon nap as the rain pattered on with it in the background.

The weekend passes by too fast.

Belly Up: The suffering of my dog’s dog

She doesn’t do this with her smaller soft toys, but with her big ones, Donna is a head banger. Maybe it has a massaging effect on her face, that’s why she likes to swing her toy violently and smack her own head with it. I realised that her collar is too loose for her when one day, after a bout of high energy head shaking and intense clinking and clanging, she managed to shake her collar off entirely onto the floor.

Guess who wins in my dog and my dog’s dog wrestling match.


Loser gets a hole on the back and dark stains for effort. Time to patch it up and toss it in the washer.

And yes, you have seen the underbelly of my dog.

Quiet evening on the balcony

The balcony takes up a sizeable chunk of our floor area (you can’t believe how small our bedroom is!), and we don’t spent enough time on it.

This was one of the few nights we actually just sat around on the balcony for a couple of hours doing nothing.

I’ve read that dogs see things the way humans do. I wonder if the dog comprehends the dense suburban landscape that she is looking at.

Presently she got tired of sniffing around and settled down for a spot of grooming. Looking a little too plump and round, my dear girl!

One of the rare times I caught her looking at the camera phone. She always looked away.

Ready for bedtime. She positions herself right in the middle of the balcony between Mr P and I. She is always good at placing herself in a centre location between us, so that she can keep an eye on each of us.

I wonder how she can lie with her front leg tucked beneath her body like that and not feel cramp.

Go to sleep!

Where did the dog go?

Most mornings when we open the bedroom door, Donna will be found right by the door on her bed or sometimes plastered along the width of the door itself snorting for us to wake up. But this morning there was no Donna in sight. It’s amazing how one’s heart can stop when no dog rushes to greet you good morning as expected. Did she manage to somehow murder herself in the living room overnight?

Nope, the stupid dog only got herself trapped in the kitchen behind the childgate. Talk about relief!

Kong Genius Leo – Roll it. Pick it up. Fling it. Eat it.

A few months back, Donna wouldn’t eat kibble. If it was presented mixed with canned food, she would pick out the kibble and just eat the canned food in the bowl. We fed her kibble with her canned food still persistently. After a while, when she got that being picky wouldn’t change her food and probably she was hungry enough by then, she started to eat kibble. But lo and behold if you fill her bowl with only kibble, she won’t eat.

kong genius leoSometime later, we bought the Kong Genius Leo. I filled it with a mix of treats and kibble. Donna’s first Kong was a regular one which we bought to keep her busy when we are out of the house. She was so used to licking the regular Kong, usually presented to her with frozen food within, that she used the same method to tackle the Genius Leo.

Of course that got her nowhere and she grew frustrated easily, her frustration usually accompanied by louder and more disgusted snorts and grunts. And then she just left the Genius Leo alone, probably too disgusted to continue.

I continued to give her the Genius Leo now and then. There was a chance she would pay some small attention to it when she smelled treats in it, and needless to say, she totally ignored it when it was empty. Since her level of interest in it was really not that high, I felt it didn’t justify the cost of the toy.

Then one day, perhaps she was feeling particularly fidgety or maybe she was just bored. I suddenly hear a whole series of snorts and pillow bashing sounds. I came out of the study to find the dog worrying the vase-shaped blue rubber toy around the living room. And when a plain kibble dropped out, she ate it!

I read somewhere about the nothing in life is free training for dogs. That was the point I really started to believe in it. The dog worked to get the treat out of the Genius Leo and even if it was only a lowly kibble, she ate it with nary a thought. She wouldn’t have eaten it if I just gave it to her. Believe me I tried.

It took quite a number of attempts on her part before she realised that the trick to work it was not to lick it but to roll it, pick it up, fling it and try again. Then she started to show more interest in it. We’re lucky the space around her bed is empty and fairly spacious because there are times she flung the Genius Leo quite a distance.

And after she munched any kibble that flew out of the toy, she would retrieve the Genius Leo and bring it back to her bed where she would proceed to worry it some more. The bed helped her to hold the toy and keep it in place. It was more likely to slide and roll on the smooth floor.

And then the fun starts all over again. You can even take turns kicking with her, except that the thing doesn’t roll reliably as a soccer ball :/ wahahahaha!

Today, I have started to feed half of her kibble in this way. So instead of breakfast in a bowl, she gets the Genius Leo filled with kibble. Ten to fifteen minutes of Genius Leo workout to help burn off some of that stored fat, physical energy and mental energy at the same time.

It was fun for her too. The wagging tail tells it all!

Note: When it comes to cleaning, the regular Kong is easier to clean. The Genius Leo has narrow holes which makes it harder to clean the interior. Since I only fill it with dry food and dry treats, I just slosh detergent with water inside and rinse and rinse and rinse.

You can buy the Kong Genius Leo in pet stores or on Amazon. :)

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Kong Genius Leo
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Swallow the pill like a good girl please

The last time we had to feed Donna any pills was when she came down with the kennel cough. At that time the pills were really small and it was easy to just hide it in scoops of canned food and hand feed her to make sure the pill goes down her throat with her food.

This time for her being poisoned by a hydrangea leaf, we were issued bigger pill capsules as well as a bottle of syrup that smelled strongly of mint. Definitely not easy-peasy items to hide in scoops of canned food.

I had never really tried to pry Donna’s mouth opened before on my own. Like hello, dog newbie here! That looks like a lot of teeth.

But when I first found her with the bit of hydrangea leaf that she had spat on the floor, I just pried her mouth opened without overly thinking things. It was really not difficult, and she did not really give much of a struggle. And that really gave me confidence to just pry her mouth open and pop the larger pills in her mouth. (She wouldn’t eat it on her own if you just offer it to her like one would a treat, so…). But just prying her mouth open and popping it in doesn’t help because her highness will do that tongue flicking thing until she migrates it from the back of her tongue to the front or side of her tongue where she can conveniently flick it out onto the floor again. And all the while her posture will be screaming urghh, yuck!  at you. And when she is done, you may be sure she will fill you in on her disapproval with a loud snort or two, hack maybe even three. Not that her displeasure counts, because I’ll still want those pills in her for her own good.



So nowadays, maybe it sounds a bit bad but I just stick a finger at the side of her mouth to pry it open, pop the pill in and hold her muzzle close very gently since she doesn’t even struggle and wait for her to swallow. And I do mean wait because that dog can hold that pill in her mouth and just sit still as a rock for however long it takes until the capsule dissolves and she decides to swallow rather than to continue have the mess of dissolved capsule and powder coating her tongue.

Oh yes, she can look unimpressed until the pill disappears down her throat and it is time for a treat. I treat her after each and every pill she swallows but I don’t think that has helped her to decide to swallow it faster to get at the treat faster. The good thing is she is not averse to pills and will sit there and calmly wait for you to pry her mouth open, versus the more compulsive panic she displays when you need to squirt stuff in her ears to clean them.

Do you have a better way to feed pills to a dog? I would love to hear since my achievement  in that area is only to force it in and make her swallow.

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