I cut my dog's hair myself for the first time

Nadi is getting old. She is currently 12 years old and working on 13. She absolutely hates going to the dog haircut salon and in the past I have always just made her endure it anyway. This past time though, she was shaking when we walked in the door and was clearly a lot more afraid than normally and she gave me a look of "you betrayed me!" when I handed her over to one of the technicians there.

Since she has been having other health problems and because I care about her a lot, after I got her back that time I decided that I was going to learn how to do it myself.

Here is the finished product but I have some pics that show steps along the way. She was a lot more calm with me, at times she seemed even to be very relaxed. We went onto a towel on the floor in the bathroom and she chilled out and accepted what was happening. She did resist a little bit but for the most part because it was me doing it, she complied and remained calm.

We did take a lot of breaks though because since we were doing it on the floor I had my back in positions that kind of hurt me half of the time. I pretended the breaks were for her but that was not what was really going on.

I have this hydraulic desk in my office that I purchased when I hurt my back. It's one that rises up and down with a very powerful motor so the next time, we will do it there. The mess will be worse but we'll deal with it.

In the past 2 photos you can see that I have no finished yet, the legs and head are the hardest parts to do.. well other than the feet but I didn't try to get inbetween all of her toes the way they do at the shop. It's not that big of a deal and if it becomes a problem I will take care of it, Nadi's fashion show days are behind her. Now we are just aiming for comfort.

Doing the head is pretty tough too because she has her eyes there, and she watches in a sort of horror as this loud clipper thing keeps getting close to her eyes. If she moves too quick i could accidentally hurt her, and we don't want that.

I save the "before" picture until last. I think I did a pretty darn good job considering I have only ever done this once before many years ago. Don't you think?

I managed to only cut her one time and even though the clippers have guards on them, this can still happen. She didn't even make a sound when I did cut her and it was just from one of these bumps that her body has in a lot of places and it is normal for aging dogs to have them. Later on she did what dogs do though and spent like 45 minutes licking the same spot over , and over, and over and over.

All in all I would say that it took me a couple of hours but mostly that was because I was taking so many breaks because sitting on the bathroom floor and doing something active in there wrecks havoc on the back of most people my age. My flexibility to stay in such a position for long periods of time are certainly not what they used to be.

I can imagine that I will only get better at this as time goes by and in the end it doesn't really matter anyway because Nadi doesn't care what she looks like and if I do screw it up, my friend will just laugh with me, not at me. Nobody is ever mean to Nadi, no matter what she looks like.