Portable Bailey Chair for Travel

 

Above is the bag that holds everything Sidney needs to travel - and if you can believe it - there is an entire Bailey Chair in there as well.  The other pictures show it in various stages of being assembled and Sidney is modeling it on our boat in the top photo.

If you want the plans - email me at ryanpluta@yahoo.com - I put them into a word document with photos and instructions.  If I could figure out how to make them downloadable from here I would do that.  But for now - just shoot me an email.

Someone who reads the blog was nice enough to upload the files to a link for everyone to download:

Sidney's Portable Bailey Chair Instructions

Whether we go on vacation and family and friends watch Sidney or travel where we we take him with us, we need an easy way to transport Sidney and his Bailey Chair.  So we created a Portable Bailey Chair.  We've traveled before for weekends and to move all of Sid's stuff is a huge hassle. The main Bailey Chair is heavy, huge and cumbersome. Then to put all of his meds, food, toys, blender, etc in the car to travel takes like 5 trips.

I made him a Portable Bailey Chair, which is a huge convenience. It basically slides into place and is held together with a few dowel rods and grooves. It breaks down and is constructed very fast - like about 20 seconds. You can see in a photo above the broken down Portable Bailey Chair stacked in a pile.  I bought an Eddie Bauer lightweight roller-travel bag from Target that holds his Portable Bailey Chair, food, Bethanechol and Prilosec, Magic Bullet (that we blend his food with), feeding bowl, bottle of honey (his treat), towels, blankets, toys and his schedule instructions.  It has a botom ziper compartment that holds the Portable Bailey Chair, so everything fits in one duffel bag with wheels and a handle too!! HUGE difference. Now taking Sid away or having people watch him is much less of a hassle than it was before!!

Problem solved!

Meet Butters!

So we are finally ready to get Sidney a baby sister.  Sidney is now 3 1/2 years old and still loves to play like a puppy.  Meet Butters, our new 9 week old Yellow Lab.

We wanted to get a puppy so that we could train her to live on Sidney's routine. We wondered how to manage a MegaE dog and non-MegaE dog feeding routines.  Basically, we feed Butters when Sidney is in his chair and Butters has already figured out that Sidney's blender noise is her feeding time too.  So this is working out so far. We brought Sidney along with us when we picked out Butters.  We wanted to make sure they got along. Butters was the first puppy to show interest in Sidney.  So she won!
              

Sidney and Butters play really good together.  Sidney is impressively tolerant with Butters and it seems that he is helping us raise her and take out some of her puppy energy, while using up some of his own!  It is so much fun watching them play.  Plus, Butters plays with all the million toys we bought for Sidney that he chose to ignore! We try and be mindful of Sidney when giving treats to Butters for her puppy obedience and house training.
We use the Lickety-Stick for Sidney and Butters gets the training treats.

One main thing for us is making sure Butters doesn't drop any food that Sidney can eat - or us forgetting to pick up Butters' food and water bowl when we let Sidney out of his Bailey Chair.  

With Butters, we are trying to make sure she gets enough water - the food part is easy - she eats her food up fast.  We will give Butters water when Sidney isn't in his chair - we just keep an eye out to make sure Sidney doesn't try and get some for himself.  He is usually pretty good about not doing that.  He is more used to the Bailey Chair and Knox Blox. We're happy to have Butters as part of the family and Sidney is happy to have a sister to play with every day.  Plus, Butters likes to hang out with Sidney when she is done eating while Sidney is still in his Bailey Chair.