Straight Up

When a three-hour feeding schedule almost made us quit

I can’t tell you how many dinners this past sit I’ve been stared down (with full attention, mind you) by our latest four-legged friend. He’s a sweetheart and cute and cuddly and all the other good bits dogs are, but man is he impatient when it starts nearing dinnertime.

I will say he does have manners when it comes to his begging — there is no whining or jumping or pawing, just those intense stares that make you want him to look away almost immediately. It’s created a unique eating experience for us this time. With our day ending mid-afternoon, dinner typically happens between 3–4p PST so he has to wait through cooking and eating of our human food he can’t have and then wait another hour to get anywhere close to his meal.

And he’s not the only one — thankfully the cats so far have been more self-sufficient and required less active feeding and more making sure food is available, but dogs on the West Coast really test your patience when you the human are eating hours before they’re set to. I think we’ve been the unintentional cause of some very distressed pups with this shift and can never fully get them to adjust to our way of things.

And it’s funny, right — here we are traveling the world with our life packed into either our car or a storage unit in Vegas and we tie ourselves down sit after sit to another pet and their established schedule. That first sit really was an experience — the dog needed to eat every three hours (something we weren’t told explicitly beforehand) so our ability to go out and explore and be part of the world was severely limited to the dog’s schedule. It definitely brought a sour note into the first sit and overall experience and had us thinking if we made the right choice. We didn’t realize the effect it had on us at first, but as we left that first sit there was a small conversation about if that’s how they’re all going to be, then we need to really think about this and what we’re willing to do. If we hadn’t had three months booked solid with other sits and did that first one as a single standalone, I think there’s a good chance we would have made a difficult sweeping decision about our way of life and what we were willing to do to live it how we wanted.

We’ve gotten so much better at picking up those hidden bits about food and schedules. Walks don’t happen at every defined time and food can be a little early or late. Flexibility is what doing this was meant to embrace, but there is that rare occasion where we’re the ones bending to the schedule instead of it flexing to meet our way of life.