Trouble & Squeak
Quite a while ago I told you about Lilly's love for squeaky balls, and I've also mentioned her favourite toy, a quacking duck from Home Bargains, both of which are not expensive, so when the squeaking and quacking dies it hasn't been costly to replace them.
However I am conscious that keeping replacing them is not really great for the environment, so I decided that although nothing could be done to save the balls, I could use my making and mending talents to repair the ducks.
We had ended up with a number of mute ducks, in various colours, and in various states of mangling. She always plays with them up until she manages to puncture the plastic bag that was the air bladder, or until we take them off her when she rips a hole and starts pulling out the wadding innards - an exploded duck in the lounge is a sight to behold!
It wasn't a case of just replacing the bag, as the quacker works in a similar set up to a bagpipe - it has to be capable of drawing in air by itself before Lilly's jaws clamp and squeeze the air back out, so I set on a mission to find replacements.
I headed to Amazon, as you can pretty much find anything on there, but these little air-quackers proved elusive, so I started looking for alternatives.
Now squeakers are in plentiful supply on the aforementioned shopping site - big ones, little ones and everything in between. There are ones for human toys, ones for dog toys, and all have reviews, so I spent time reading reviews telling me which was which, and how well they could stand up to a bit of doggy munching.
It's amazing how much time you can lose to reading how Rover only took 2 minutes 23 seconds to demolish his toy, or how unimpressed Luna was because her new squeaky toy wasn't in the same decibel range as her last one.
Honestly, my will to live was ebbing away.
Then I came across some squeakers that mainly, about 95%, had great reviews, so a quick few clicks later they were ordered along with a bunch of other stuff (I wouldn't do an order just for squeakers, that really would be a waste of resources), and the following day a bag of 50 arrived.
I gathered up the dead ducks that I had been hiding from Lilly, grabbed my needle and thread, and began the process. I surgically sliced them open, removed the old quakers, and put 2 new squeakers inside each. Behold Frankenduck!
One of the ducks made the ultimate sacrifice - he was too far gone, his war wounds would never have healed properly so he bravely donated his inners to save/re-plump the other 3 ducks.
Two brown and one green duck returned to do battle on the Dog Bed of War, ready to squeak Lilly into glorious submission. She was so happy to see them return, and proceeded to chomp away at heads and bodies to make them talk.
It took a few moments for her to find the little noisy bladders, but when she did it was like a bunch of Scottish pipers had invaded and taken up residence in our lounge. She went at it non-stop for about 10 minutes, at which point we noticed the noise started to dwindle, then it stopped.
It wasn't that she had got bored, she never gets bored!
It was that she had killed the 'supposedly sturdy' squeakers one by one until all that could be heard was the feeble up and down of squeakerless plastic.
I'd had great intentions, but unfortunately the equipment didn't hold up. I tell you this story not to put you off doing repairs - repairing is better for the planet, but mainly in the hope that you will learn from my failure, and realise that reviews on Amazon are basically a big pile of steaming horse💩, and a complete waste of your time.
In the end, I'm not really that bothered that they are a bit useless, I knew that for £6 for 50 that they probably wouldn't last too long (though I had hoped for longer that 10 minutes), but I still have 44 more of them, so those remaining ducks better be prepared for me to go all Hannibal Lecter, and keep slicing them open to stuff more of those noisy little buggers inside, because my Lilly always get what she wants, and what she wants is to make ducks SCREAM!!
