Kids and dogs: Same thing?

To those young couples or you ladies who want nothing more than to be parents but don’t yet have the children needed to test whether or not you would have the patience, time or proper nurturing characteristics required of such a person, I suggest getting a pet to use as a litmus test of your parenting skills.
I suppose any pet will do but to get a true assessment of yourself I recommend a dog as the animal of choice, and for a true test of your parenting abilities I think picking out a puppy would give some real results of how good a parent you could be.
Although I am already the parent of a beautiful baby girl I still consider how I handle certain situations involving Joanna's dog (named Mona) as a nice analysis of how I will react to my daughter’s potentially destructive ways as she grows up.
In recent months I have had to cope with the perils of dog ownership that resulted in some vehicle and home maintenance repairs.
The first incident took place during a fundraiser auction in Ennis. A friend’s sister was hospitalized and ended up dying that weekend and Joanna was at the hospital with our friend while I covered the event. Because we had left Mona alone all day I decided to bring her with me. That was a big mistake.
After being left in the car a little too long I came outside and from a distance saw in the moonlight Mona’s head peeping above the back seat and what looked to be hanging jungle vines dangling from the ceiling of my car.
As I walked closer, I could see what had happened. Despite having plenty of air with the windows cracked, Mona apparently thought she was trapped and tried to claw and chew her way out of the roof, resulting in the fabric of my ceiling, the headliner and my passenger-side visor being destroyed.
Now I’m not one of those people who think their vehicle is an extension of their anatomy, but my car has been very good to me for the past seven years and I felt like I had let her down as an owner.
Since catching Mona in the act of her disobedience I justifiably punished her and it was one of the longest and quietest drives home I have ever had. It took me several minutes just to even turn the radio on because I was too mad to want to hear music. I just festered and kept questioning Mona about why she would do such a thing to my car, hoping she would suddenly learn to communicate with me and explain her actions.
I spent the following week visiting salvage yards to get replacement items for the car before the ceiling’s fabric is replaced, but the second accident involved repairs that were needed on a much faster timetable.
Joanna came home on a Saturday night to find Mona with blood on her face. She searched the apartment to figure out the cause of Mona’s cut and found her bedroom window shattered. I was phoned and upon arriving we cleaned Mona up and checked to see whether she needed to make a visit to the veterinarian. It was decided she wasn’t in such bad shape that we couldn’t wait for my sister-in-law, who works for the SPCA, to look at her the next day. Following that, I inspected the damage and determined some sort of event on the outside caused this damage and Mona stuck her face against the broken glass.
For me, Sunday afternoon was spent purchasing glass and materials needed to repair the window while Joanna and my sister-in-law patched up Mona’s cuts and gave her some antibiotics.
As you can see this is not exactly how I had imagined spending my weekend but when you have a pet sometimes these sorts of things happen and you have to deal with the consequences. If you can’t imagine altering your schedule for your pet or having the patience required to get through the destructive times then it is completely unfathomable to think you are ready to raise a child. I’m not saying dogs and babies are the same thing, but the analogy in raising them is not that ridiculous.