We Have A Dog

We have a dog.

This sounds like a normal sentence; a run of the mill conversation piece.

But there’s something you need to understand about us and dogs right off the bat – ours are inevitably ill-behaved.  They are not mean, bitey, snarly things – but they are very jumpy, slobbery, generally obnoxious, and could easily be classified as certifiable morons. 

Moira is no exception to that rule – in fact, she may be the rule.  Moise (as we call her most often – like noise, with an M – as in more noise – which is fitting…), is almost definitely related to Marley, of “Marley and Me” fame – except that she’s a chocolate lab.  They must at the very least be second cousins thrice removed. We also affectionately call her Moiron.  Maybe this is verbal abuse, but she doesn’t seem to give a rip, so we continue to amuse ourselves thus.

She has charisma – which is a brilliantly kind way of stating that she does many stupid things with great flair.

Apparently, she will always dig holes.  Especially where we have planted new grass seed over the last hole she dug and we filled.  One day she dug a hole under the back deck.  The deck, just for reference’ sake, is close to the ground – very close to the ground – mere inches.  There is nothing under the deck but more dirt.  Apparently it was uncharted territory, because she dug right on under there, like a happy, fat, stupid little groundhog.  This went well for her for a week or two – she’d dig under there, and we’d see her beady eyes staring out at us, and hear her tail wagging happily against the tops of the boards.  She’d shimmy out, army style, with great gusto when she was bored, or after we’d called her 23 times to come inside.

But one day she got stuck. 

There was no way I was going to crawl in after her, and I figured she’d manage to extricate herself after a while – she’d been doing it regularly, after all.  There she was… waaaay under the porch, with her shining eyes gleaming out at me like two vacant LED lights.  I would say that she attempted to inch forward, but it was more like millimeter forward.

I walked back into the house.

“Well, she’s done it this time.”

“Just give her a few minutes,” said my husband with absolutely no concern in his voice.

“What if she really can’t get out?  What if we have to rip the boards out of the porch?”

“Then she can live under there,” he stated dryly.

I checked on her five minutes later.  Still stuck.

Ten minutes.

Twenty-two minutes.

She had managed to come forward about 2 feet.  I could just touch her collar.

I decided it probably wouldn’t be the best idea yet, to grab said collar, or her head. 

I also wasn’t about to grab her legs.  If I hurt one, she’d be given a home made splint, as I had no intention of going into 18 years of debt simply because she was dumber than a concrete block.

I tried coercing her with my most excited voice, treats, digging away the area a bit.

No dice.

Finally I took my husband’s advice and gave up. 

Apparently she heard a dog walking by from half a block away, because 15 minutes later, I looked outside, and she was tearing across the back yard like a Kentucky Derby champion. 

Figures.

The mother of one of the neighborhood kids recently stopped by to chat.  We stood by the fence in the back yard, next to our minivans in the driveway, batting away the flies and mosquitoes and ants and winged creatures that are overtaking Virginia in annoying swarms. 

At first, Moira’s head kept bouncing up from the other side of the fence. 

As far as I know, she doesn’t have a crack addiction, so it must have been all hyperactive excitement. 

When this failed to move us emotionally, she stuck her head down by the edge of the fence and managed to find a long garden stake that was directly beneath it.  It was as long as she is.  [At some point in the last 1.5 weeks, we had lost her red ball.  She was obsessed with her red ball, but now it’s gone.  Buried perhaps, or taken by one of the neighbor’s skulking cats, as revenge for the near heart failure she inflicts on them regularly as they try to slink along by the garage, short-cutting it to their own domain.] The loss of the red ball must have made her desperate at last, because she proudly carried that dumb garden stake around for the remainder of the time that we were outside.

After seeing the trick of the garden stake retrieval, I’m wondering if she didn’t somehow eat the Steelers garden flag that suddenly went missing from the other side of the fence six months ago.

Later in the evening, we were eating dinner, and she was sitting on the bench by the sliding glass doors.  We put the bench there so that she wouldn’t jump up on the door.  It does the job quite effectively, but now she’ll sit on it and stare mournfully at us, inducing the greatest amount of guilt possible. 

“Your dog is vulturing again,” said my husband. 

Indeed she is.

Snoopy has nothing on the hang-dog expression she’s gracing us with.

I walk over to the door, open it, and feed her a piece of my dinner roll. 

We’re all sitting around the table, chatting, eating dinner, and I happen to glance over again.  She’s licking the glass.

This is new.

What the crap.

Then she moves her lips back (yes, dogs have lips), and her teeth squeak and click gently on the glass.  She thought the white wooden “pane dividers” on the window were on her side.  She wanted to nibble them.  Because apparently the whale-sized case of rawhides, and a wooden garden stake aren’t enough for her.

She is given fresh food and water, and let in to her own little room, with her bed and her toys, and her windows that look out at the birds.  I don’t think she really notices the birds through the windows, but when it gets dark, she barks incessantly at her reflection in the glass.  I always wonder if she’ll mercifully go hoarse.  So far, no luck.  I say a prayer, yet again, that the neighbors won’t hate us.

On her back, she has a missing patch of hair.  She’s been shedding her winter coat for the past few weeks, but this is a true bald spot, because she scratched it on something – probably from getting stuck under the porch another day while I wasn’t watching.  The bald spot bothers me.  It makes her look more ridiculous than usual.  She’s a beautiful lab, but we do live in the south, and it’s often hot, and even when it isn’t hot, she runs around until she’s hyperventilating – either way, with her tongue hanging out of her mouth a good 90% of each day, the bald spot doesn’t help matters any.  It reminds me of Shenzi from the Lion King – or of the picture going around of the 4 types of labs.  Black lab, yellow lab, chocolate lab, meth lab.  She could be in serious competitive running for “meth lab” today.

I reach down and grab her ears gently and pet them, then kiss her soft head and look into her deep chocolate lab eyes.  There is no Old Yeller connection going on here.  She’s avoiding my gaze like a mis-behaving 8 year old, searching out of the corner of her eyes for a treat in my hand.  “Sit.”  I command.  She sits… then she lies down, just to get that out of the way too, and then she stands up again, all within 2 seconds, then commences bouncing around jubilantly.  I give her the treat after a few more attempts at sit and stay, because finally one sit sticks for more than a millisecond, and I decide that’s good enough. 

There is truly nothing else that I care to mention on this subject at the moment, so until my sister regales us with a novel on her hilarious beasts (and they provide significantly greater entertainment than my solitary hound), you will be left with this awkwardly timed ending!

-R.

The Thing About Other People’s Kids

Tonight I was talking with a friend.  It wasn’t a new or unique conversation, by any means, and, as the vast majority of the conversations I have with friends currently in the exact stage of life, marriage, and child-rearing as I am do, this one focused on our kiddos.

So there we were, looking pale, bleary, and exhausted, with our painted on smiles.  Both of us were white as sheets, but we’d taken the time to put on lip gloss before heading out to Bible study.  Somehow, we women subscribe to the myth that lip gloss makes us look slightly more awake and slightly less haggard.  Maybe to a non-experienced observer it does…

Maybe, when we’re running to Food Lion at 10 PM because we just realized that we were out of bread for lunches tomorrow, and out of milk, and out of pre-packaged, GMO laden, sugary desserts to put with our children’s squishy lunchbox offerings, because we’re just too danged tired to slice an apple and sprinkle lemon juice and cinnamon on it… maybe someone we know will be perusing the bread or milk, and will miraculously look put together, and because we have lip gloss on, they’ll think we are put together too.

Or maybe it just reminds us that we’re alive, so that we don’t scare the crap out of ourselves when we glance in the bathroom mirror before heading to bed.

But I digress…

Get used to it.

It happens more often than not.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

Obviously she was ready to strangle the general population, or curl up in a ball and sleep right there, on one of the long church fellowship hall tables.

But I asked anyway.

“Yeah – I just… the kids were screaming their heads off at each other in the car on the way home.  Sometimes I just don’t even know what to do.  I just wish we could be one of those families… those families that don’t have fighting kids in the back of the car all the time.  They fight in the car, they fight when they’re playing.  They even get into huge fights over who gets to say the blessing at dinner.”

“You aren’t alone.” I said. 

Inside I was cheering and doing cartwheels, just a little, because it’s always nice to know that your children aren’t the only ones who sound like they want to kill each other on a regular basis – even over something as sweet as saying a prayer.

[On a side note, my youngest daughter was crying hysterically last night after she had been safely tucked in to her nice warm bed, in her nice warm pajamas, in her very clean, cozy room.  Hysterically…  Sobbing to the point that I looked at my husband in a panic and ran up the stairs like I was actually trying to burn calories.

Was she sick? Was she hurt?  Was she scared?

No.  None of the above.

She was in raucous tears because her sister had started humming while she was trying to say her bedtime prayers.

I was incredibly sympathetic, and told her that the only time I wanted to hear her crying in such a manner EVER again was if there was a dire emergency, like a fire, or she was being kidnapped, and to go to sleep NOW.

My adrenaline was in a bit of a tizzy at that point.]

But back to my friend, I tried to placate her, with a very short rendition of our own afternoon. (As follows…)

There was a large pile of Beverly Cleary “Ramona” books on the coffee table in the living room.  There were many more things on the coffee table as well – all of which had magically matriculated there, seemingly overnight.  Now that the girls have gotten older, I have been drawing their attention more and more to situations which give me the opportunity to say “if everyone in this family did… that… what would happen?”

“If everyone in this family shoved their dirty socks under the coffee table or between the couch cushions…”

“If everyone in this family spilled half a box of Rice Krispies on the floor and didn’t sweep it up…”

“If everyone in the family decided to not replace the roll of toilet paper…” <- this one is futile, just for the record…

“If everyone in the family draped their coat, books, purses, toys, wii remotes alllll over the living room and kitchen table and in the office and left them for someone else [ME] what would happen?…”

I get a lot of blank stares.

I pray that one day it’ll click.

So back to the pile of Ramona books…

Daughter N usually pulls this stunt, so I called her to the living room. 

“You need to put these books away if you aren’t using them anymore.” (And they quite obviously were not being used…)

“J was the last one looking at them. She was using them.”

“J - come pick these books up – don’t leave them for someone else to clean up.”

So Daughter J comes in, and moves them to the shelf UNDER the coffee table, and looks up at me innocently…

“That’s where I found them.”

I called Daughter N back into the room. 

I also called Daughter A, even though I knew she had nothing at all to do with the situation – just to be fair.

“One of you put these books here.  Who was it?”

*Deer-in-the-headlights-stares

“I don’t care who took them out, but they need to be put back on the bookshelf in the office right now.  It’s not my responsibility to clean up after you, and it’s no one else’s responsibility either.  If you took them out, all you have to do, is put them back.”

At this point I dismissed A, after confirming that she hadn’t read those books, or looked at them, in probably years.

N and J decided to start arguing over who had taken them out.

“I didn’t bring them out here.”

“Well I found them out here.”

“Well I never touched them, I don’t know how they got out here.”

At which point I was more than a little PO’d, because ALL I wanted was for someone to cart the small pile of books back down the hall to the bookshelf, which would have taken maybe 5 seconds – and now it had turned into a huge festival of tall tales – maybe not on the scale of Paul Bunyan, but close enough.

“I’m giving you THREE seconds to tell me who brought them out here and start carrying them back to the bookshelf.  ONE of you brought them out here.  I know it wasn’t Dad or me!  The dog doesn’t read Beverly Cleary.  I know we don’t have magical little book-reading fairies unshelving our books, and hiding them in strategic piles in the living room.  They didn’t miraculously appear under the coffee table.  SOME one put them there.  Start remembering which one of you it was, NOW.”

Blank stares.

More - “well I don’t know how they got out here” statements.

Now, there are a few things that I cannot and do not tolerate in our household, and one of them is lying.

We aren’t fans of corporal punishment, and have given the girls no reason to be afraid to tell us the truth.  Plus, they know from past experiences that lying to us will land them in a HEAP of trouble, while telling us the truth means they will be given a punishment, but with a whole lot of grace thrown in… 

So basically at this point I was livid.

I still, to this very minute, have no idea who took the books out, though Daughter N had a Ramona book opened, and book-marked, on another cabinet altogether in the kitchen, which I found just minutes after the “stack of books” incident was over.  And considering that of the two, she’s the only one who can actually read… not to mention other such incidences, I have my strong suspicions...  But there still was not sufficient evidence. 

Cue the family meeting in which I was on the verge of total tearful meltdown, while ranting on the subject of earning trust, privileges, responsibilities, etc.

So when I told my friend “you’re not alone”, it may have sounded trite. 

But it wasn’t.

Because the thing with other people’s kids is that they pull the same stunts yours do.  And if they don’t pull the exact ones, then they have their own little circus routine, designed specifically to drive their parents batty. 

The thing with other people’s kids is that they refuse to poop on the freaking potty too. 

They throw their plate of mac-n-cheese on the floor (ceiling, wall…) too.

They kick their sister when they think no one is watching.

They say snarky things to their siblings under their breath, OR they scream snarky things to their siblings at a decibel that should be used only for the purposes of warning an entire city of an impending tsunami.

We’re all in this parenting thing together.

We ALL have felt at different points that we really really really are going to lose our mind before the day is out, no exaggeration.

Or we’ve felt like we’ve screwed it all up irreparably already – that the character traits they have at the ripe old age of 9 are set in stone and we’re doomed… doooooooommmmmed.

So - the next time you see that family of 16 kids in walmart.  You know – that family whose kids are holding on to the side of the cart calmly, without trying to steal rides on the edge and almost knocking it over, not blocking on-coming cart traffic, not climbing on top of the toilet paper vats just because they’re “fluffy”, not “checking” the eggs for cracks while you grab a box of butter 2 inches away, not dragging their sister out of the cart by her nearly-dislocated arm, not secretly hiding $5 dvds and candybars under the Great Value Kleenex and boxes of instant oatmeal, not screaming because their sippy cup is empty – or dripping the sippy cup down 8 aisles in a “Hansel and Gretel” stunt before you finally notice…

Just remember …

It’s obviously because they’re drugged.

And the next time you see the family with kids doing everything else on the list, just smile at their mother, and then look the other way – because it’s probably me.

-R.