I've often theorized that raising small children is akin to having a dog. More than theorized, actually, since we have one of each, and the similarities are uncanny (except that we've actually managed to housebreak the dog, and have been far less successful with the toddler). Before anyone gets all up in arms, allow me to draw the parallels:

A domesticated dog is generally pretty helpless, depending on you to feed, bathe, provide water, etc. This does not of course include the times your animal tears apart your kitchen and eats your gift baskets right before Christmas (not that I'm bitter). I get flashbacks of this nearly every morning as I watch SB rifle through our pantry, emptying its contents on the floor in an effort to find an upgrade on the breakfast I'm about to present to her.

My dog understands a lot of what I say, but chooses to ignore most of it. Ditto for Otter.

Foster does best with simple, one-word commands like "sit", "come", and "stop." So does SB.

Foz gets rewarded with dog cookies. SB gets rewarded with human cookies. Though I suspect she'd eat the dog ones too.

Each morning we play the cracker game. As you will see, both participants play very similar roles: I hand each of them a cracker, Foster devouring his immediately, while Otter runs around waving hers, waiting for Foz to chase her, protesting loudly when he does (or worse, steals her cracker) until she finally hands her cracker to him. At which point she promptly demands another cracker so that we can start all over again.

If you're still not convinced, allow me to describe a scene from this afternoon. We were all playing in the back yard, with Otter gleefully chasing her ball around while Bree and his dad played a game of PIG (HORSE's shorter cousin) using wadded up balls of paper and a wastepaper basket. Of course, Otter was obsessed with anything they were doing and kept moving the basket around (which I think messed with the rules). In order to distract her, we started taking the balls out of the basket, throwing them to her and watching as she chased after them and threw them back into the basket.

"You realize we're teaching the girl to fetch, right?" I asked Bree. "And I think with far greater success than when we tried this with the dog." He nodded and threw the balls again - a little further this time.