Picket Fence Post

The Picket Fence Post Family Christmas/Hanukkah Card Photos: Recent photo session with the three Picket Fence Post children was a disaster. Said session was punctuated by tears, parental threats, puffy eyes (still red from previous bouts of crying which delayed the taking of photos until children’s eyes were less red), forced awkward smiles (called to mind the web site Awkward Family Photos), an energetic (and slightly vicious) pediatric pillow fight and the labeling of yours truly as, and I quote, “the worst person in the world.” (No, the kid who said that does not watch Keith Olbermann’s declarations of who the “Worst Person in the World” is for each particular weekday. However the mere fact that I asked the children to put on nice clothing and brush their hair is clearly grounds for human rights violations. I should start planning for my trial at the Hague.) I’m contemplating actually using some of the odder, weirder shots and chronicling the photographic debacle for a bit of holiday humor, greetings for those with a sense of humor.

Mentos/Diet Coke: This summer I bought a six-pack of 16.9 ounce Diet Coke bottles and a six-pack of Mentos packets with the intent of reenacting the Diet Coke/Mentos explosion — the one you’ve likely seen on the internet – in our backyard. Long story short, I just — FINALLY — got the chance to do it this afternoon after weeks upon weeks of The Youngest Boy whining, “When are doin’ the Diet Coke-Mentos thing?”. What a bust. Maybe we did it wrong because it didn’t look anything like we thought it should. Maybe we should’ve used a two-liter bottle instead of those small ones. Completely anti-climatic.

Soccer’s Over. Hello Basketball: The final soccer games of the season for The Girl and The Eldest Boy were rained out on Saturday. (The Girl’s game was re-scheduled for Sunday, but we were at my niece and nephew’s combined birthday party. The Eldest Boy’s game has yet to be re-scheduled.) And just as I was starting to enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to race around delivering them to various fields for practices and trying to remember who had the game where and whose practice ended when, we’ve started receiving e-mails to alert us to the fact that basketball season starts in two weeks. (The Spouse is The Girl’s head coach and is assisting The Eldest Boy’s team so things’ll be insane around here in short order. Not many family meals together during the week I expect.) Meanwhile, The Youngest Boy just started a once weekly hockey scrimmage thing on Sunday mornings before church. (That doesn’t include his Saturday morning hockey skills sessions.) How is it that I was naively thinking about getting a break?

Going on Month Four of Working at the Kitchen Table: The Picket Fence Post family puppy Max, now 6 months old, is still not completely housebroken yet. Whenever he sets his paws on a carpet, he acts as though it’s the grass outside and he pees. So that means he spends his days in our kitchen on its hard wood floors (on which *knock wood* he hasn’t had an accident in a very long time). But since he’s a puppy who’s still teething, Max needs to be monitored or else he’ll gnaw on the furniture and get into stuff. (That’s when he’s not in his crate whining about the fact that I had the nerve to leave the room.) Guess who’s been doing the monitoring? That’s right. I’ve been working on my laptop at the kitchen table or the kitchen counter for almost four months so that I can allow Max to run around when the Picket Fence Post kids are in school. (Once they get home and heap their stuff atop mine, the kitchen looks like a Superfund site.) We recently had our backyard fenced in and that’s taken some of the pressure off because I can let Max out to romp around (and tire out) like the little maniac he is, but the world starts feeling mighty small when you spend most of your days confined to one room. Kind of feels like I’ve been grounded. Then again, maybe I deserve to be grounded, what with being the worst person in the world and all.

The Picket Fence Post’s Havanese/Wheaten Terrier mix puppy, Max, is now four months old. He’s been residing in our home for a little more than a month now and we’re all still adjusting to the little fur-ball’s presence.

Despite two of my three children’s initial enthusiasm about getting a puppy (one kid was on the fence about the whole thing but now says he loves the pooch), they’ve proven the common wisdom that once the newness of having a dog wears off, they’ll stop helping out, or at least moan about how hard it is to help out. Despite the fact that they are now starting to whine and complain when we ask them to take Max out and clean up his business, The Spouse and I are still making them do it — arguing that we’re on one big team — plus we’ve been asking them to feed the puppy, no matter how badly they think his food smells. 

In the month since Max has joined us, we’ve realized that getting a puppy is indeed similar to taking care of a small, needy child in many ways.

First of all, he’s not verbal and had no eating/sleeping/going outside schedule when he came to live with us. We’ve been trying to get a read the clues which indicate he needs to go out, but they’re not consistent and, because he’s a puppy, he frequently makes mistakes. I’ve been trying to put him on an eating/sleeping/going out schedule since the kids have returned to school — per the advice of the puppy training books – but that hasn’t been working out exactly as I planned as he’ll sometimes pee in the house immediately after being allowed to linger outside. I’m being patient though, ever so patient.

Second, Max gets into everything, so we need to limit the trouble he can get into by removing everything that might prove troublesome. Thus far, he’s beheaded a frog toy, done a fine job gnawing at the spindles on the bottom of the kitchen chairs and tried to eat his dog bed. I looked in his crate the other morning and found that the metal zipper to his dog bed had been removed and was sitting between his paws, as though he was poised to eat it. After noticing that several teeth from the bed zipper were missing, I removed the zipper entirely from the bed . . . which just made it easier for him to climb in between the bedcover and bite at the bedding insert, so I just took the damned thing away.

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Remember way back in December I wrote about how, less than 10 hours after The Spouse’s 18-year-old cat died just after we decorated our Christmas tree, that The Girl began inquiring when we’d be getting a dog, just like the Obama girls? The issue about which I also wrote a column?

Well now it’s been four months since we first broached the subject of getting a dog for our family. The Obamas got their dog a few weeks ago, and now The Girl is wondering where OUR dog is. I told her that we’re still in the deliberative/research phase of this whole canine thing. The first step was to figure out what kind of dog we’d like, I told her, so, when we were at the library over the weekend, I borrowed a photo-filled book of dogs for everyone’s browsing pleasure.

The Youngest Boy (7), for some reason, kept saying, “Let’s get a pit bull!” To which I replied, “Never. No way.” Then he modified his request, suggesting that we get a dog he could “ride,” To which I said, “Never. No way.”

Since I work from home and will likely spend more time with this dog than anyone else in the family, I’ve made the executive assertion that I get to set some of the ground rules such as: No huge or drooly dogs. “Small dogs make small poop,” I’ve joked with the kiddos (half joking . . . kind of), adding that I don’t want some princess-y pocketbook dog either.

With those loose criteria in mind, the kids started to place bookmarks in the dog book to indicate their favorites. The Youngest Boy put bookmarks next to pictures of Yorkshire terriers, Cairn terriers (like Toto from The Wizard of Oz), a West Highland terrier (sensing a theme here?), and a pit bull terrier (he just wouldn’t let that pit bull thing go). The Girl echoed her younger brother’s West Highland terrier choice (those dogs look just like the McDuff character in the Rosemary Wells books) and a miniature poodle (my parents have a black one named Kelly whom she loves). The Eldest Boy, who has repeatedly said he does not want a dog but is resigned to the fact that it’s going to happen whether he likes it or not, ironically identified big dogs, a golden retriever and a Labrador retriever.

I decided not to identify any type specific breed because I don’t want to overly influence others, except for eliminating pit bulls and giant, drooly dogs that a 7-year-old could ride like a pony.

However The Spouse has yet to put any bookmarks in the dog book . He’s not so much on this dog bandwagon. Me thinks he’s going to need a bit of a nudge.

That being said I’d love to hear from you dog owners who have dogs and young kids: What kind of dog do you think would work for a busy family of five (kids ages 7, 10 and 10), given that I don’t want a big, drooly dog that’s difficult to care, groom or train?

Image: This web site.

. . . after the death of our family’s 18-year-old cat before the words were uttered:

“I want to get a dog.”

Here I was in mourning, having never lived in a house/apartment post-college without this tiger-striped cat, while The Spouse was deeply sad after having witnessed the cat being put to sleep, and the 10-year-old girl was already talking about getting a dog. (Whenever the issue had come up in the past, our response had been that we wouldn’t even entertain the notion of having a dog while we still had our geriatric cat.)

We’d just had a toast to the deceased feline at dinner. We’d looked at old photos when she was but a small kitty. The kids were having on-again/off-again crying/sniffling jags. We all noted how strange it was not to have the cat’s water and food bowl in that corner of the kitchen, and how we knew it would be a long time before we’d stop looking for her underfoot as we walked around the kitchen.

So less than 10 hours after the death of our cat, the suggestion that we now get a dog threw us. (The cat’s remains haven’t even been handled yet.)

“It’s way too early to talk about something like that,” I said, looking at The Spouse incredulously.

“Maybe for Christmas, you could get a dog for them,” the Eldest Boy said to The Spouse and I as we washed the dinner dishes, referring to his two siblings who kept chattering about a dog as if they were the Obama girls.

Guess my worries over how the kids would handle it all — as well as the trauma of witnessing a couple of our cat’s violent seizures in her last hours — were for naught.