There is a critter on my lap. As I (attempt to) type this, Lily the dog is perched on my lap, thrusting her nose under the one hand that is typing. I'm petting her with the other hand, hoping that attention will suffice, but no. Both hands must be scratching behind both ears and, like my children, she knows that if she pushes the issue and looks cute enough I will eventually stop typing.
Heh, heh! I sent her outside. Typing: 1, Hound: ...well, she's won too many "Give me your undivided attention or I will chew the couch" arguments to give her a zero. It's more like Hound: 18, Typing: 1 and that one was only successful just now because there was a stray cat in the yard when I opened the door. Otherwise Lily would have taken one look outside, then looked up at me, and said, "You want me to go? But, but, we've spent so little time together lately."
Our other dog Caramel never turns down the opportunity to go outside. Have you ever seen Spongebob Squarepants? If you have, then you'll know what I mean when I say that Caramel is Sandy Squirrel. She has a Texan accent and wears a bikini. No, not really. I mean she's bounding with energy. If she had the voacl chords for it every time she runs outside she'd cry, "Wooooooooohoooooooohoooooo!" And she's getting HUGE. If I could, I would make the word "huge" bigger so you could get a proper sense of Caramel's hugeness. Wait, I think I can. Let me check my tools (taking a minute to put on old lady glasses and peering at the font tools above my blog that confound me, as does other modern day fancy things like Twitter, cell phones that take pictures, and Brittany Spears's unending appeal) Ah, here we are! Font size. Caramel is HUGE.
She's taller than Lily now, which I think confuses both of them. Lily is a 16 month old, 20 pound Boston Terrier mix, and Caramel is a two month old, 19 pound mix of whatever types of dogs it is that breed other enormous dogs. To me she looks like a lab, but others say they see rottweiler and pit bull in her.
I think the hermit crab is dead again.
Delilah, however, is still a beautiful, dainty Ninja cat. Christopher and Emma call her "Ninjapoop," which I think is a play on "nincompoop," and they simply love saying it. Whenever Christopher says it, he laughs so hard he has a difficult time standing up. Ninjapoop is also sometimes used as a verb. The other day when Delilah jumped from the top of the refrigerator, onto the counter, and then flung herself onto the kitchen table (I won't describe the layout of my house, but let's just say that was an impressive bit of athletisism to be performed in three quick movements) Emma said, "Mom! Did you see that? Delilah ninjapooped herself onto the table!" And then she laughed so much that she collapsed, swept away by her own hilarity.
Some of you might not know that our house is actually the one that I grew up in. There's a mix of good and bad memories here, and many of them are memories of the pets I had as a kid. Some of them are buried in the backyard, and some of them left us while still at a ripe young age. Mostly that was my fault. My sister Stephanie loved capturing little critters. She would catch a butterfly or a frog and study it inside a box in her room. Whenever I looked in the box and saw, let's say, a frog, I'd watch the confused thing hop at the cardboard walls, not knowing where he was or how to get out, and I would begin to panic.
"You should let him go," I'd tell Stephie.
"No, he's my pet. He likes it in here," she'd say, taking a miniature chair out of her dollhouse and setting it inside the box just in case the frog wanted to take a load off and sit down.
"He can't possibly like it here. He lives in the water."
"But he's my friend," she 'd argue.
Eventually I'd leave the room, aggravated that I couldn't get my six year old sister to understand that frogs don't like cardboard boxes or sit in chairs. At the age of eleven, I didn't understand that she was just a little girl, the youngest of the family who got all the hand-me-downs and the last share of everything, and who wanted something of her own that would love her exclusively. So I'd wait until she left the room, sneak inside, and set the frog free. To this day Stephanie, now 27, talks about how she would capture interesting backyard animals and I would help them escape, like a pre-teen PETA activist.
Claire, Emma, and Christopher all have their aunt's interest in science, and bring home freakazoid creatures they find in the dirt, like those bugs that look like sticks. I don't immediately release them like I did 20 years ago. The kids get to study the bugs or amphibians in a box for the day and then let them go in the evening.
It would simplify life if I did the same with the dogs and the cat. Our house is their box and they're much more demanding than frogs. But I'd miss things like the little wet nose shoving itself under my hand as I type, an action that says, "Love me! I am fuzzier and cuter than a laptop!" Lily's at the backdoor now, stray cat long gone. I think I'll let her in. God help me, she is so much cuter than a laptop.
