The Dog Lover

I refinished the floors last night and today. I could not bring myself to sand out the purple glitter paint created by my dog Maggie when she inadvertently walked through a Girl Scout fabric paint project and tracked paint across the floor. So I put high gloss polyurethane over purple glitter paint in the middle of the living room floor to preserve her smeared foot prints. It is a Midwestern 21st Century version of Mexican tiles with coyote tracks. I am sure it will irritate the next owners of my house to no end.

You'll notice that I could not get a picture of the purple paw prints without my newest dog insistent that she know what is going on.



I am not sure how I have been in denial about what a Dog Person I really am.

There are dogs that work their way into me. Lady was one. Anja was one. Maggie was one. And I struggled long and hard with my next dog and ended up with this big galumph from the pound. No one really gets why I picked her. My veterinarian literally stepped back the first time that she saw her. I have sixty pounds of slobbering labrador who follows me everywhere and she has actually been a really nice replacement for a 7 pound shih tzu who couldn't climb steps anymore. I have decided that it doesn't make sense to anyone but me and that's ok. This dog meets my emotional needs and if I am honest it is because she is interested in everything that I do.

My dog trainer is Lincoln's Dog Whisperer and he identified my emotional issues with this dog on the first night that he met us. After four weeks of lessons, when she gets in my way, I know how to tell her to lie down and stay and I do it with enough authority that she actually does it.

She's not Lady or Anja or Maggie. But I identified the same type of devotion and love in her.

Linebacker Faces

This is one of my favorite pictures of Frank. I took him to Fan Day at Memorial Stadium and Frank got to meet the football players and get signatures. He wanted to meet the Linebackers.

"Shall we smile for your mom?" Corey McKeon asked.

"No. Let's give her our tough face," Frank suggested.

Yeah. Wanna line up across the scrimmage line from these two? :-)

The girls are not interested in sports the way Frank is. Mary loves soccer and plays it in fall and spring. Nothing else holds her interest. Anna would rather choreograph a ballet, or play tennis or golf. Frank truly enjoys multiple team sports and also watches them on tv and follows them in the newspaper - his friends talk about sports and they play sports at recess. Mary loves soccer practice and games but doesn't like to play soccer at school. It is a much bigger part of Frank's socializing.

I signed the kids up for summer sport camps through the public schools. The camps are held at the high schools even for the elementary and middle school kids. Two of my girls are learning tennis at the Lincoln High courts, for example. Frank was excited about football camp and I figured out that it was because he thought since it was at the high school that he would get to wear football pads and tackle. Uh no. Just flags still.

I've gotten multiple calls from different parents about fall sports. I left the choice up to Frank.

"Frank I need to sign you up for fall sports. Do you want to play soccer or football?"

"Football," he said, with no hesitation.

This blog is in part a record. I am curious to look back at some point. I peer at the pictures of my kids and I wonder at what is reflected back. What will this influence or affect if anything?

Boy Scout Camp

Last night I got phone calls from parents about fall sport registration. There is some jockeying to figure out what kids are doing what sports and who is going to coach. The early registration deadline is June 22nd for sports that are played in September. It's hard for me to get past my June plans at this point, but I had conversations about flag football vs. soccer and micro teams vs. rec teams. I am not sure what Frank is doing. I need to ask him what he wants to do. It does not matter to me. His best friends are doing soccer and not football, but I know that Frank loves football and he's really looking forward to football camp in July. So I am curious to see how this goes.

Sometimes choices are easier.

"Would Dad like to go to Boy Scout Camp with Frank this summer?" I asked my mom on the telephone a few months ago.

"He's packing his bags right now," she laughed.

"Doesn't he want to know the dates or where it is or who else is going or what they're doing?"

"Wherever and whenever it is, he'll be there. I think he's loading the car with his camping stuff right now."

Painted Nails

Today while I was bathing, Sadie nosed the door open and then dropped her ball in the bath tub. She stood back and proudly smiled at me.

As a mom of three I can tell you that that exact same thing has happened to me 80 bajillion times with kids and their various toys or snacks, but it is the first time that a dog has ever done it.

I have a client who is pregnant and she's probably not going to keep her baby. This morning while I was sitting on the front porch touching up my nail polish I thought, you know, maybe Bill and I could adopt her baby. Which is of course totally insane. 6 kids, 2 dogs and 2 cats and now I want a baby. Then I thought about how much would change and how much has already changed with this dog that is super dependent on me and thinks that I want her toys in my tub. I like sitting on the porch drinking coffee and painting my nails. I can promise you that when I had babies my nails were never done. So the thought was there for about four seconds, but it was there.

Farm Work

You can smell the strawberries when you walk towards the field carrying your empty basket. I forget that every year, but as soon as I smell it I remember. And I forget how red everything gets. The basket, our hands, our knees, our clothes, the kids' mouths...

We got the idea to give strawberries to teachers for an end of year present. We found little dishes at the thrift store and made little tags - "You're sweet! Thanks for being my teacher." Then we went to go pick berries in probably the last week of the season.

Some years when we go it's too early and the berries are small and not many are ripe yet. Other years they are perfect and sweet and thick on the plants. We come home with boxes of them those years - one year I froze twenty pounds of perfect strawberries. This year we worked really hard to get hardly 3/4 of a box (about 10 pounds). They were small, but they were really sweet. We found most of them in the middle of the rows where people had passed them by. We covered a lot of rows and got not many berries. The kids started out cheerful, lost their cheerfulness and complained about the straw and the sun and the bugs, and then finished up with quiet resignation. They had forgotten their complaints by the time we got to the car with our big box of berries.

"Do you appreciate the fruit and vegetables that we buy at the store more now?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"Someone picks all those fruits and vegetables that we buy at the store. It's a lot of hard work, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah, but they at least get paid. We had to pay to do work," Anna said.

"Well, I paid for the berries," I said. "We get a reduced price since we picked them ourselves."

Anna still seemed skeptical.

The gifts for the teachers turned out really cute. We even had enough left over to make two fresh strawberry pies. They weren't cool last night when the kids went to bed. I promised them pie the next day. In fact, we had it for breakfast. I decided that fresh strawberry pie is just as nutritious as a donut and people eat donuts for breakfast all the time, right? And besides, it's the last day of school.

My dad sent me this Worm Poop website which is very, very funny.

My parents actually have worms. My mom is a professor and she teaches education students how to teach science to elementary school kids. So she raises worms and brings them into workshops and stuff and teaches the teachers how to use the worms to teach kids. (It's all very convoluted this teaching someone to teach thing.) When the worms are not at a seminar or class they are sitting in the laundry room at their house. They live in a plastic box full of dirt and organic matter and they are covered in plastic. My kids clearly think of them as their grandparents' pets, as in, "Grandma, can we feed the worms?" or on the telephone they'll say, "Poppy, how are the worms?" or we'll be eating cantaloupe and the kids will reminisce, "When we're at Grandma and Poppy's house we always feed the worms our rinds."

When we were gardening earlier this spring we had some baby robins in a nest by the garage. We enjoyed watching the parents feed the robins and of course this often consisted of worms. The kids even helped the parents out a couple of times by pulling the worms out of the soil as I turned it and putting them in a dish of water under the bird nest.

There are three kinds of worms, I have decided - commercial grade fertilizer worms that sell their poop, pet worms, and robin feed worms. Wait. Four kinds of worms. Fish bait worms. The kids gleefully fish with worms. But they would never ever use one of Grandma and Poppy's domesticated worms for any purpose other than having as pets.