Morning Girl

She gets up so early. 
It is dark outside, the dogs are fast asleep, I am fast asleep, and her brother is still snoring away, but Emma is up and cheerful and ready to chat up her Dad before he heads off to work.  She likes having him all to herself for those precious moments in the morning.  I think she enjoys the quiet house at that hour, when the choice of where to sit is hers alone with no one to bargain or argue with her.  The choice of what to do belongs to her as well…she can watch NickJr without her brother constantly trying to convince her that a Star Wars movie would be a far better choice.  So much of her day is dictated by the whims of Harry, but the early morning belongs to her. 
When Brendan comes to kiss me goodbye at the early early hour of 6:10 he gives me the Emma Report:  Emma has already had breakfast and is watching cartoons or Emma is in the bathroom or Emma is reading in the living room or Emma is having oatmeal.  She is content to stick with whatever activity she has chosen for the little while it takes me to fully wake up and come downstairs, at which point she will call out a sunny, eager “Good morning, Mom!” as if she has been waiting around just to see me.  This girl knows how to make you feel special.
If we set out her clothes the night before, Emma will be up and dressed and ready for the day before I have had the first sip of my tea.  She tells me about her dreams the night before (often involving getting lost when following a stray cat, but being saved by Daddy and of course the cat comes home with her), about her ideas for the day ahead, and more often than not she will tell me, without any trace of laughter, “Mom, you look very beautiful today”.  This to my bed-headed, rumpled pajama, sheet marks still criss-crossing my face, half asleep self, but the seriousness in her delivery makes me believe it, too.  I love seeing myself through her eyes. 
Finally, an hour or so later, Sir Harrison will stumble down the stairs, groggy and cozy and still smelling of little boy sleep, and her wakefulness will be too much for him.  He will curl into me, trying to twist his lengthy leggy-ness into a pretzel that will still fit on my lap, and she will tell him all of the things she has already told me, and likely her Dad, too.  When he is ready he unwinds his long limbs and climbs down from my lap and they both try to convince me that Star Wars should absolutely be the movie choice of the day, that nothing else will do, and can we please have chocolate cake for breakfast?  And then they are off together, surely plotting against me, but so involved with each other that I cannot help but smile. 
And in the afternoon, our Morning Girl finds the consequence of rising before the dawn:

We Miss You

I have never met a dog who looked like you.  I’ve never known a puppy who whined so much, or chewed so much, or itched so much.  I have never in my life encountered ears as soft as yours.  I have missed your soulful, forgiving eyes for one year now…those eyes that told me you understood we were doing the very best we could for you, even when it was a battle, which it often was.  I just want you to know that despite the struggle, you were an awesome, awesome dog.  I miss you.  We  miss you.  You are so very fondly remembered and loved.

Poor Puppy

This little one is quite sick, in the veterinary hospital for a second night tonight.  We’re sitting home, hoping and praying for her recovery with the knowledge that she is in very good hands.  Please keep your fingers crossed with us, won’t you?

So Much To Say

After a year-long venture of house-hunting, house-selling, house-buying, house-moving, and finally settling in, there is much to say.  So much to say that there is no good place to start, not one finite point at which the story picks up and continues.  So instead of trying to play catch-up, I will dust off this keyboard and start with today.  Today I am sitting in my new-to-me kitchen in my 109 year old house, looking out the bank of windows that frame our kitchen's banquette, watching the snow come down in big, puffy flakes that blanket the yard, the swingset, and the pool beyond.

I am loving this new house.  It is old, and the wear shows in many places - 109 years builds up a good amount of wear!  There are dings in the trim and patches in the hardwood floors, and ancient windows that no longer open and shut.  But there is goodness, too, in the littlest of details here, there, and everywhere.  I appreciate the stamped door hinges, the rounded wall in the upstairs hall, the canning shelves in backmost basement room, the scrolled wood on the fireplace...so many things are good that I have gotten used to the things that aren't so good.  This kitchen is cold, both in temperature and aesthetics, but it has a good deal of space and we can make do until we have the money to make it our own - I know that one day it will be the coziest spot in our home.  Until then, I have gotten used to putting on a sweatshirt when I want to linger here and it seems fitting that the chilliest room in our house is also where the teakettle is put to good and frequent use.  This is my favorite place to sit in the late afternoons; while the sun splashes across the table I knit and watch Harry and Emma play outside with our dogs.

Speaking of dogs, while writing this I have had to get up at least ten times to rescue an odd shoe, slipper or glove from the jaws of the monster puppy, our newest addition to the family.  New because we lost our beloved Riley during the holidays to cancer, and our house just seemed wrong without two dogs.  So Ginger is here now and she is as spicy and naughty as the name suggests.  We adore her and find her impossible in equal turns; our plan is to weather this first year of her life as well as possible until she settles in and becomes the good dog we know she will be.  But Puppyhood!  Oh my, I had forgotten how tough you can be!

Emma has a static cling problem.  Winters here are dry, dry, dry, and her hair is constantly crackling.  It is a static mess that clings to her face but she refuses to tie it back.  It drives me a little crazy, the way it is constantly both stuck to her face and aflight in a perfect halo of wildness around her head and I find myself trying to tuck it behind her ears lately, which she hates, in the same way that I hated it as a child when my mother tried to tuck my own static-challenged locks behind my ears.  I guess some things never change.  She has had a growth spurt in the last month and the jeans I just bought are already looking short.  Pre-school has brought about so many changes in her demeanor, a bloom of girl child that amazes us and a blight of girl attitude that makes us inwardly cringe, knowing that the teenage years will make this seem pale in comparison.  She has definitive ideas about fashion, spends hours a day on artwork, and will be glad to dance it out in the kitchen with you as long as you agree to play some of her self-professed favorite band: Weezer.  She talks with her hands with big, expressive gestures that make us giggle.  She is funny, wildly funny, and we simply cannot imagine what life would be like without her.

I am recently the mother of a five year old, the fact of which nearly blows my mind.  I have moments when I can perfectly picture Harry as a young adult -  a certain glance, or the way he stands just so, makes me see him as he promises to be one day.  At other times he is very much the baby boy I met in an airport hallway, the one who sprung me, ready or not, into motherhood.  We registered him for kindergarten two weeks ago.  Kindergarten!  Holy cow, time flies by and they grow and suddenly we're faced with the impending doom of homework.  I feel, quite acutely, the passing of time with him and I wonder if he feels it, too.  He is reading, not just sounding out words but knowing them at first sight and getting ahead of me in books.  He reads the newspaper headlines while we eat breakfast, the words on billboards while we drive, and he has an insatiable appetite for books, even sleeping with them tucked beneath his pillow.  He plows through life, setting the standard and leading the way for his sister to follow, a task that is both a blessing and a burden on his little shoulders.  He is a great, great boy, still moving ahead with that force that has always been his.

Brendan is in the basement working out.  (Hours have passed since I first started this post...the kids are in bed, or should be, and night has fallen outside of my kitchen windows.  It is still snowing, but softly now; it is no longer in such a hurry to accumulate.)  We had to wedge his univeral weight set into the first room on the basement and it just barely fit at all.  The treadmill lives in the kitchen now, a severe lack of headroom in the basement making running at treadmill height impossible for him.  He has been such a good sport about this.  He gave up a lot in this move, man-room wise, but he has weathered it in good spirits and we are trying to find ways to accomodate the things that don't seem to fit.  People did not think about home gyms in 1901, I suppose.  When he is done working out we'll watch LOST in high definition on his new flat screen, and suddenly it won't seem so bad that he had to work out crammed into that basement.

I have to end this post and insist that a certain five year old go to sleep now, despite his seeming need to stand at the window and watch the snow come down.  He is beyond excited with tomorrow's potential for sledding in Crandall Park, but if he doesn't get some sleep he'll be too tired to climb back up the hill when his run is done.

We're Here

We are in the new (old) house.  We are here, living with odd sleeping arrangements while upstairs floors are being refinished, piecing together a new life with various odds and ends of stuff from our old one, making due with what we have this day, while we wait for the rest of our belongings to arrive and be unpacked sometime in the (hopefully) near future.  We are all, relatively, unscathed by the move.  Except for Charlotte, who has taken to defecating in the house and generally being a big pain in the bum.

Let it be known that moving is not easy.

In the space of time that occurred between my last post and this one, we have:

1. Celebrated Emma's THIRD birthday

2.  Said goodbye to our home of over five years

3. Had a lovely end of summer vacation at Lapland Lake

4. Celebrated Emma's very first day of preschool

5.  Celebrated Harry's first day of Pre-K

6.  Walked to the balloon festival from our new-old house

7.  Shuffled back and forth to different beds no fewer than six times while waiting for closings and for our floors to be refinished (stinky oil poly)

8.  Welcomed the new West baby to the world.  Congrats, Jeremy and Michele, and big siblings Isaac and Isabelle.  We can't wait to meet the new little guy!



It's been a busy few weeks and we are, understandably, kind of exhausted.  We're hoping to get back on track now that we are finally living in our house.  We have a million things to do but most importantly we are trying to maintain some sort of schedule, some sort of sanity and security for our kids whose lives have been so disrupted these past few weeks.  Soon, I tell myself, soon.

Two more babies! And Coco!

Pictures of Coco are here!!! Isn't he just the cutest darned thing? I love the ear fuzzies, and the tough guy stance. He is just adorable, and loves to snuggle underneath your chin. Brooke is smitten, and I think she made a good choice of character with him.

It has been a September for babies of all kinds!

Our friends, the Wests, have welcomed their baby girl to the world this week, and we can't wait to meet her! She was 8lbs, 9oz, and 21 (?) inches long. I hear she's very pretty...the proud papa was walking the family dog around the neighborhood this afternoon, and I have to say he was positively glowing. He didn't even look all that tired, which amazes me because when Harry came home I was too exhasuted to think straight. So heartfelt congratulations to the West family on their newest addition!

We also have a new puppy friend to meet ASAP, this one a baby beagle girl named Lindy, belonging to my friend Liz's parents. I am looking forward to being reminded of how small Charlotte was when we brought her home.

There's a new baby in town

Ooooooh! (insert happy clapping and big smile) My sister, Brooke, has a new (fur) baby! His name is Cocoa, and he's a four month old long haired chihuahua, and I think she said he's cinnamon colored. I can't wait to meet him!!!! I do so love babies of all kinds!!!

I've spent the last 1/2 hour researching sweater patterns to knit for the little guy as a welcome home present, but the patterns I found all involve fun fur. So I ask you, can a male chihuahua pull off fun fur, or will he just look really unfashionable? What if it's brown or grey fun fur? Does that make it any more/less cheesy?

And Tony, how big is a 4 month old chihuahua puppy, generally speaking?

Ode to Riley, Charlotte, and Max the Bunny

I don't want you all to think that we've forgotten our first loves since the arrival of our son, so I will devote this post to the furry ones that live amongst us.

Max was our first baby. We got him at a pet store in a mall while living in an apartment in Rye, NH. While I don't believe in buying animals from pet stores and perpetuating the puppy/kitten/bunny mills that are out there, we just had to bring Max home. It was the day before Easter, the pet store window was filled with fuzzy little bundles of hoppiness. There was one bunny that stood out from the rest. He was bigger than the others, which meant he was older, and less likely to go home. He also had a bunny poop squished into his fur, which more than sealed his fate. He wasn't going anywhere looking like that, and it wasn't his fault he'd been born for a pet store sale. But we weren't supposed to have any pets at our apartment and Brendan insisted we think it over before buying him on impulse. The next morning we decided to go back and get him. We drove to the mall, and found it closed. It was Easter Sunday. I was devastated that our bunny had to spend one more night there...we went back the next morning and bought Max the Bunny who, by the way, still had a poop squished into his fur. We took him home, cleaned him up, and he's been our buddy ever since. He lives in our loft now, in a cozy condo complete with hand painted house and play yard...he has the softest fur in the world - it is far better than cashmere or angora or any of the other so-called soft fabrics out there. The way it feels is, I imagine, much like how we think touching clouds would feel. Max is a character...he has a close and personal relationship with two bouncy balls from the grocery store which is, incidentally, how we determined his sex. He is terribly curious, lightning fast, and always busy. We have to give him new things to chew on and destroy frequently to keep him from getting bored. Right now he is watching me type this, and probaly wondering why I'm not offering up any yogurt snacks.

Riley was the second furbaby, and our first dog. Almost a year after we brought Max home, and a few months after the purchase and recarpeting of our first house, we decided having a dog might be fun. I researched shelters and found one I liked that had a program called Homebound Hounds, in which hunting breeds (labs, hounds, spaniels) from an overwhelmed no-kill shelter in Virginia were brought to New England to find their forever homes. Shelters in New England seldom have these breeds available, instead they tend to have very large breeds (rottweilers, pit bulls, etc....all fine dogs, but not what we wanted). One day in February Brendan finally gave me the go-ahead to go and get a puppy. My friend Margie and I drove from South Berwick, ME to the Sterling Animal Shelter in MA (http://www.sterlingshelter.org/) to pick out a small female dog. We arrived before they were open for the day and a line of cars formed behind us. When they opened the gates we went through pen after pen of puppies, all of them beautiful and well cared for. The sign on Riley's pen said "hound/shepard mix, mother was 30 lbs." One of Riley's brothers bit my pant leg and tugged at it and Riley followed behind him, very curious but a little too skittish to approach me on her own. I picked her up and she melted into me, all warm and soft and cuddly, and promptly fell fast asleep. I spent more time looking at the other puppies but could not bring myself to put her down, so she came home with us that day. Riley's life has been a series of medical disasters...as a puppy she suffered from chronic yeast infections in her ears, and broke out in boils whenever she came into contact with hay or straw. Her eyes swelled shut after a bug bite and she needed the equivalent of an epinephrin shot to yank her out of her reaction. She had what seemed like an asthma attack after having a Bordatella vaccine sprayed into her nose (this is one way the vaccine can be administered) and we raced to the vet yet again. She had surgery to remove a large lump of gunk that was obstructing the healing of her ruptured ear drum. We finally got her ears under control while living in CT, and then we moved to NY, where the rest of her promptly fell apart. Her skin is an almost constant rash of boils and irritation, and her ears are going through stages of infection again. We have very good vets helping us through all of this...we've done allergy testing and the results show she's allergic to, well, everything. Beef, chicken, oak trees, dust mites, most yard weeds, yeast, wheat, etc. We tried allergy shots, but she reacted badly to them and ended up at the emergency room for pets. Right now, Riley is medicated daily with Prednizone, and she sometimes needs Benadryl and antibiotics as well. She is now a whopping 50 lbs and does not resemble hounds or shepards in the least. We have her skin and ears under control, and her quality of life is good. She licks and scratches quite a bit, but she's a love of a dog and I would not trade her for any of the other puppies I could have brought home that day. She was my comfort on the darkest days after our infertility diagnosis...she sat with her head in my lap as I cried, and licked me reassuringly. I know that she will always be as dedicated to us as we are to her, and for that she is a great dog.

Charlotte Louise (yes, she has a middle name) joined our family in the fall of 2004. She was our obligatory infertility dog (OID). We were down in the dumps, it was Brendan's birthday weekend in October (he was turning 30) and we had no plans. I suggested we go to the animal shelter and just look at the puppies to cheer ourselves. When all else is dreary, there's nothing like a little puppy love to brighten your day! We drove to Save-a-Stray in Corinth(http://www.petfinder.org/shelters/NY61.html) and spent hours playing with the puppies. There was one little beagle mix in a pen outside the front door, and she was sooooo cute...Brendan had always wanted a beagle so it seemed our fates were sealed. We drove to the bank, deducted the correct amount of money, and brought home Charlotte. We didn't know much about beagles, except that they howl, but we found out very soon that they are full of heart, spunk, attitude, deviousness, and love. She is a dear dog, although wild in her abandon of manners and decorum. She sits daintily with front paws crossed one minute, and the next she's chasing your feet as you walk, or howling at a bug on the floor. The dogs are fed at 7:00 pm each day, and Charlotte sits in the kitchen looking longingly at her dish starting at 5:30 or 6:00. It is the only time of day that she shows any type of patience. She paws at the door feverishly to be let in...if it were wooden there would surely be a doggie door clawed through it by now. When guests come to our house she is a bungee dog, jumping straight up into the air trying to get closer to the guest's face so she can lick it. She snores. Loudly. She is as healthy as a dog can be, and visits the vet only for shots. When the first snow of the year falls, Charlotte stops using the deck stairs and instead gets a running start, then jumps with all her might as far as she can from the deck. It is hysterically funny, and she gets quite a bit of distance for such a small dog. SHe likes to sleep covered up with a blanket, and sometimes crawls under our bed and howls in the middle of the night. Oh Charlotte. You are a stinker, indeed.

Max has now fallen asleep to the sound of my typing, and Charlotte is on the bridge growling playfully to Riley below. It's time I put the computer to bed and spent some time with my little furry friends.