An odd solution to a puppy problem.

I am an early riser. I have been for at least the past 15 years. I’m usually up and out of bed by 6 AM. My body wakes up and, since I either didn’t want to wake my soon-to-be ex-husband or I had things to do, I’d get up and start my day.

My day starts with a routine that I’ve shared with Alex the Bird for almost 10 years — since Alex the Bird came into my life. I throw on some clothes, come into the kitchen, and brew some coffee, often reciting the mantra “Coffee is the most important thing” — a phrase that Alex the Bird still hasn’t picked up. While the coffee brews, I prepare Alex’s scrambled egg in the microwave. I cut up half of the egg and give it to Alex in a little dish atop her cage. Then I settle down at the table with my coffee and my laptop or iPad and enjoy the very first cup of coffee for the day while catching up on Twitter or writing a blog post — like this one.

(When I was home in Wickenburg or Phoenix with my dog Jack and then Charlie, the routine also included letting him out for his morning pee, putting a scoop of food into his dog dish, and topping off his water. He’d get half of Alex’s egg, then wait around Alex’s cage for the pieces of egg that dropped and gobble them all up. But those days are apparently gone for good, so it’s best not to dwell on them.)

The routine is pretty much the same when I live in the Mobile Mansion in Washington. After all, coffee is the most important thing.

Enter Penny the Tiny Dog. Or Tiny Puppy right now. Her routine is a bit different. After her morning pee, she comes in and cleans up after Alex the Bird’s scrambled egg droppings. And then she comes to me where I’m invariably sitting at my desk and starts jumping up on me. She wants to play.

Of course, I’m just getting started on my coffee. Not even half of it is gone. I’m not ready to play. Heck, I’m not even fully conscious sometimes.

A side note here…yesterday, one of my Facebook friends shared one of those images with a message — you know, the kind always floating around Facebook. This one said:

My favorite coffee in the morning is the one where no one talks to me while I drink it.

My reply was:

Mine is the one where a tiny dog doesn’t jump all over me for attention while I’m drinking it.

The solution is to distract her with something more interesting and rewarding than me rolling around on the floor with her. And that solution involves a beef soup bone and some peanut butter.

I bought the bone at the supermarket about a month ago. It didn’t take her long to eat the marrow out the ends. The bone is nice and dry and kind of clean. The holes on either end go in pretty deep. Sometimes she still plays with it.

I bought the peanut butter to bait the mousetraps. I don’t really like Skippy because it has sugar in it and I don’t think peanut butter should have added sugar. And although I like peanut butter, sometime over the past 10 years or so I’ve developed a sort of allergy to it; after eating it, I just don’t feel quite “right.” I switched to cashew butter, which is harder to find but very tasty. Of course, it’s not on my diet, so I don’t have any around for me or the mice. So I went to the supermarket and bought the smallest, cheapest jar of peanut butter they had. It turned out to be Skippy. I don’t care about feeding sugar to the mice.

One day, on a whim, I put a bit of peanut butter in each end of the bone and gave it to her. I was rewarded with about 15 minutes of peace and quiet to finish my coffee. Afterwards, she found something else to keep her busy.

Now it’s part of our morning routine. When she’d done cleaning up after Alex and she starts jumping up on me to play, I prepare the peanut butter bone and give it to her. I can then enjoy my coffee in peace.

The only problem is, she’s getting really good at licking that peanut butter out of the holes.