It’s So My Mom.

Pikachu is my parents’ overfed, 9-year-old Chihuahua. I like to say that if he were a real man, he’d be a 300 pound Mexican. The kind that walks around with his stomach poking out of the bottom of his white t-shirt. (Disclaimer: I’m part Mexican, so I can say that.)

Needless to say, this is not a dog who has been particularly active. Now the plumbing’s not quite working, and the poor dear is incontinent. My mother’s solution? Slap a diaper on him.

Except that he never actually pees in the diaper. Instead, they’re dropped like poorly hidden Easter eggs around the house: two near his doggie bed in my brother’s room; one at the door where he pines for my father; one in the kitchen, where he managed to wriggle out of the thing in record time.

My boyfriend laughed so hard at the spectacle that he started to cry. But he sobered up in the car to insist: “That’s just not normal.”

I’ve decided that I don’t completely disagree with my mom on this issue. “Not normal” is my mom swaddling our months-old Chihuahua, Lady, in doggie diapies. She’s not totally potty trained yet, and in the interim, what should be looked at as inconvenient carpet piddles are considered an unallowable horror in my parents’ house.

But what else are you going to do with an incontinent dog than slap a diaper on him?