DIY Reusable Check List

I have a semi-long story about a really fast project I made for my dogs. I have two pug dogs: Petey and Roscoe. Petey is a year and a half and Roscoe is seven years old. We got both of them from dog rescues last year.

Petey was born to a breeder, but was born with a prolapsed rectum. The breeder didn’t want to pay for his surgeries, so he gave him to the vet. The vet worked with a private dog rescuer who we ended up getting Petey from. We paid for his surgeries and took him home when he was just three months old. He’s been like my baby ever since. He’s the most loving dog you will ever meet. He will go up to perfect strangers and just start licking them and giving them kisses. It blows my mind to think that someone would just give him away instead of helping him just because it would be a little less money in their pocket.

We got Roscoe when he was six years old from a local pug rescue. The only thing we know about him was that his owners gave him up. We don’t know why, but we suspect it’s because of his abandonment issues. As soon as one of us leaves the room he just starts barking like crazy. Roscoe had limited use of his back legs when we first got him; he couldn’t walk up stairs because his back legs were so weak. He also had some weight issues. When we got him he weighed 38 pounds – which is a lot for a little pug dog. So we put him on a diet: one cup of food in the morning and one cup in the evening. He seemed to lose weight, he looked more svelte, and he even started running up the stairs along with Petey.

So we were shocked a couple weeks ago when we took him to the vet for his annual checkup and found out he hadn’t lost ANY weight. It turns out we were feeding Petey and Roscoe each a cup of food in the morning and the evening, and Roscoe was eating his food along with whatever Petey wasn’t eating. So my husband said we had to give the pugs some tough love and start taking their food away 15 minutes after we fed them. I didn’t like this at first because Petey is a finicky eater. Petey couldn’t care less about his food, so I like to leave his food for whenever he’s ready to eat. But after a few days of taking his food away after 15 minutes, he finally started eating right when I put the food down.

The only problem was that my husband and I have different work schedules. Sometimes one of us will go to work before the other wakes up in the morning, and then we don’t know if the other has fed the dogs yet. This was my temporary solution:

But as any self-respecting crafter would do, I wanted to find a cuter way of keeping track of when the dogs were fed. I found a few different things online where people put a cute background under picture frames and used it as a whiteboard. So I took it a step further and made a checklist to put under the glass. I made the checklist using Word and then found a colorful pug print online to use as the background. I simply mod podged the two together, and voila!

This would work well for any type checklist – especially for kids. Keep track of chores, if they brushed their teeth, etc. I’m hoping our new feeding schedule will help Roscoe with his diet, and I will definitely keep you guys updated on his weight.