This sweet little puppy
…loves to play with balls.
She likes playing fetch the best. She’ll run and get the ball, bring it back, and drop it at your feet. If you don’t keep playing with her, she’ll just continue on by herself; picking it up, dropping it, bouncing it, chasing it. She gets hours of entertainment each day chasing balls.
Problem is, balls don’t always stay out in the open where she can get them. They roll under couches and ottomans. They roll under and stop, out of a puppy’s reach. Now the playing turns into scratching and whining because of all the balls in the toy box, that particular ball is the only one worth playing with. (It’s a different ball each day, and that day that ball is the only one that matters.) The minor distraction of her playing, if we’re doing something else, turns into a major distraction until we get up, get a stick, and fish the ball out from under whatever it’s under. Again. And again. Now what?
Well, Judy found a solution for that. It’s called a Bowerbird toy blocker. It looks like this on their website.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07J4N7512/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Pieces of semi-rigid plastic that stick to the floor under furniture.
Sticking strips to the floor wasn’t working like we wanted, not because they didn’t stick well, but because it’s hard to slide a couch around to clean under it with plastic strips stuck to the floor beneath it on the front and sides, and the couch is too heavy to lift up and over. I pulled the strips up off the floor, turned the furniture over, and staple-gunned the strips to the bottom of the furniture edges and that did the trick.
The strips are set back from the edge, invisible from above and impenetrable at toy level. The furniture can be moved, and the toy blockers are always in place.
The furniture is easily moved and when Jesse tries to roll toys under the furniture they bounce right back out. The game goes on without any intervention from us!
Brilliant!