Mokey Pood on My Bed

So last night we were all having our after work play time. I was catching up on missed tv shows on the computer and the girls were wrestling on my bed. All of a sudden I heard a squeak. Not the dooking squeak but the "ouch" squeak. I gave my usual response of yelling, "Girls!" That's usually sufficient enough to break up the wrestling into a run and chase.

But this time I heard nothing. No more squeaks, no running, nobody jumping down from the bed. Just like if you have children, you know a sudden silence means something sinister is going on. So I pause Modern Family, and go into my room.

I immediately see two ferrets and a pile of poo on my quilt. Fawn is in her usual nonchalant stance. She looks at me as I enter then saunters toward the poop, sniffs it, and returns a look to me. I'm pretty sure if I were in fact dealing with kids, Fawn would be the tattle tail. She always seems to be around mayhem with this look of "Look Mom, look what she did. I didn't do it, but she did."

Poor Mokey is sadly in her usual stance - when she has done something wrong, or more broadly, when she is terrified. Mokey is frozen like a deer in headlights. This stance tells me she did it (I figured anyway) and that she knows its a bad thing. I don't know what Mokey experienced before she came here, but I know it was bad. Sometimes I wonder to what extreme due to her behavior and the fact that her fears are still so strong after a whole abuse free year here at Disney a la Ferret.

Anyway, she's in complete statue mode. I check to see how bad by using one finger to touch the top of her head. She doesn't move, doesn't flinch, its as if this action isn't taking place. I move the nosy Fawn onto the floor and say to Mokey a few words in my deep serious voice. Yes, I still disciplined her. I liked that she looked at me and listened while I told her no pooping on mommy's bed. She wasn't afraid of me while I disciplined her. This shows how far we've come!

In the past she would have hid under the couch for hours and I would have had to pretend to be asleep in the other room before she'd ever show herself again. Then I'd have to catch her and she'd bit me -those good horribly painful break-the-skin bites. Anyway, after a few words I put her on the floor and began cleaning up my comforter. The ferrets hovered around on the floor. After all was cleaned up, Mokey came right up to my feet for attention. Now we're getting to some normalcy. You can do bad things, I will discipline you, and then it goes back to everybody loves each other. And most importantly, nobody gets hurt here. I tell Mokey that all the time.

She still has a few episodes now and then. Just this past month it happened two times, that I moved while she was playing which caught her off guard and she was scrambling under the couch and refusing to come out.

Baby steps....Baby steps