Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Max the Terrible

Max, our 10-month-old mini-Wheat/Havanese pup, is not to be trusted. Not for one minute. I’m serious.

I devoted my March GateHouse News Service column to how the Picket Fence Post family really needed to keep a more vigilant watch on him so the little white and tan wrecking machine wouldn’t gnaw and destroy everything in sight. Unfortunately, since the time I wrote that, I haven’t exactly always heeded my own advice and have been distracted on way too frequent an occasion. Despite everything I said, the Picket Fence Post family remains flummoxed by this pup, who keeps finding ways to grab things we didn’t think he could grab because he’s got these really short legs, though his long body enables him to reach farther than we realize.

Like The Girl’s doll whose hands were both mangled (her right one completely removed and forearm gnarled, her left one removed of all but her thumb).

Like the unused, unopened, brand spankin’ new compact of facial power that I thought I’d placed out of his reach when I got home from the store yesterday.

Like the Earl Gray tea bag he fished out of my favorite coffee mug.

Like the nearly-full giant plastic UMass cup filled with ice water that he emptied onto the rug in the family room last night.

The list could go on and on. When will we ever learn? . . . Hey! . . . Wait! Max! . . . Sit! . . . Stay! . . . Drop it! . . . He grabbed a sock, which he’d stolen from the laundry basket. The one that I left on the sofa, near where I’m writing this blog post. (*shaking my head*)

Item #2: Me & Modern Family’s Phil

Phil Dunphy — the fictional dad from ABC’s Modern Family – and I have the same birthday. (The episode Wednesday night had his birthday slated for this Saturday, the day the iPad is available for sale.) Phil and I have the same birthday and he’s a world class goofball. And his kids, while they adore him, think he tries way too hard to be hip and fun. (Believe me, he’s not hip. Loving, yes, but hip, absolutely not.)

Not so coincidentally, my April column for the GateHouse News Service is about how my lack of knowledge about what’s considered cool in the music scene right now — cool as determined by the gospel according to Ryan Seacrest and a Boston pop music radio station — has relegated me to Phil-level status with my kids. That and the fact that my 11-year-old son says my attempts to use hip slang are already outdated, plus my 8-year-old says I dance like “an old lady.” I’d say I dance more like Elaine Benes. How’s that for an “old lady” pop culture reference?

Oh well. Phil got an iPad for his birthday, at least in the most recent birthday-centric episode. Wonder if that bodes well for me.

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When I stumbled upon a video of a then 9-year-old Canadian hockey player on YouTube via ParentDish as he discussed how differently people treat him when they see him as just a kid, versus how they treat him when he puts on his hockey helmet and steps onto the ice rink to play hockey — like he’s been playing hockey “for 15 years” — I knew I had to post it here.

The video’s apparently a big hit in Canada.The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that in 2006 the boy “wrote a speech for a class assignment pleading with hockey parents to stop being so negative. It was only intended for his class and few members of his family, but a YouTube video of [Miller Donnelly] giving his speech has recently drawn attention and has now garnered more than 85,000 hits.” That was back in January 2009.