Thoughtful Thursday

 I am going to take a hot second today and tell you about how much I adore having a dog again. It took us awhile to be ready for a new dog after we lost Beatrix because we just loved her so darn much. Annabel, though, has been a total joy.

I guess there was that time when she was very little and Ben missed the call from the vet's office telling us she had worms and we thought she was just going to defile our deck in the most horrific way for the rest of her life (POWER WASHER FOR THE ABSOLUTE WIN), but then she took meds, and she's been really truly delightful ever since.

She IS kind of a biter (just your achilles tendon!)  and a jumper and I don't usually let kids pet her at the playground (which! PARENTS! It is so nice that you have taught your kids to ask if they can pet a strange dog but also SOMETIMES THE ASNWER IS NO and stop being so JUDGY ABOUT IT) because of the jumping and the biting (it's just a nip! I swear! she thinks we're all puppies together!)

BUT. Like I was saying. UNQUALIFIED delight (ignore those qualifying paragraphs).

She loves to hold my hand (with her teeth. gently!) and walk on 2 legs like a toddler or a circus dog.

Wherever Dorothy is, ANNABEL IS THERE TOO

She loves to lounge on the girls' beds like one of the stuffies.

She adores a run in the dark.

Somedays she gets 3 runs-- 30 mins with me, 30 with Ben, and 30-ish with Jack, but most days she gets 2. Plus 4 15-minute walks. She is an excellent girl with this level of exercise.

I freaking LOVE her silly pigtail bows from the groomer

And! She tolerates our bullshit VERY WELL.

In short, she's perfection, and I am so happy we have her.

Also, we are thinking about letting her have puppies. That's bananas, though, right?

Annabel at 4-ish Months

 Annabel celebrated her 4 month birthday on December 24th, so she's already midway to five months, which seems hard to believe. 

Day one:

A couple weeks ago:

She came to us a 2.1-pound ball of fur, and now she is an 8.3-pound ball of fur. She is incredibly sweet and inquisitive. Unlike Beatrix, she is spunky and energetic and open to new experiences. The broom and vacuum cleaner, for example, are not enemies or tormentors. They are fun loud, friends she likes to play with. I adore this attitude of hers.

She also DOES NOT SHED AT ALL, and this is a life-changer. Beatrix's short hair came out in giant clumps. You could not pet her without developing werewolf hands. Her hair was EVERYWHERE. She did this funny thing where she'd get scared (often by the broom or vacuum) and drop, like, a whole dog's worth of hair on the spot. It was pretty gross.

Annabel has eaten a couple of pairs of Minnie's shoes (my bad, honestly, for leaving them on the laundry room floor) and a pair of Ben's slippers (but you guys they said PAPA BEAR on them. so good riddance, you know?) the plastic coffee cup out of a Fisher Price Little People guy's hand, and Pocahontas' torso. Plus a tiny section of a wall in the bathroom and a small piece of trim in the living room (LOL-- both look like. mouse bibbled them, which would be WAY MORE TERRIBLE, IMO). But really this is all NBD because she is so tiny.

TINY DOGS ARE WHERE IT'S AT.

Because she is a poodle, she is prone to having a sensitive stomach. She does great if she eats Hill's Science Diet kibble and beef and barley wet food (BLECH) and NOTHING ELSE. But! She patrols the crumbs under the kids' counter stool pretty aggressively, eats a piece of cheese every now and then, and really likes collagen sticks, Blue Buffalo puppy treats, and protein rings. She's fine, though, and very very very good at going outside to use the bathroom.

We hung bells by the back door, and she loves ringing them to go out. Lately, she has been ringing them for the pleasure of going out, going in, going out, going in, etc etc etc. That's how we made an amazing discovery: SHE NEEDS TO GO ON LOTS OF WALKS!! I love this for me! I take her for a quick 15- minute walk first thing in the morning and another before I pick up Minnie. Then Minnie and I bundle up and walk her to the park in our neighborhood in the afternoon, and she and I do laps around the park while Minnie plays, and we all walk home-- this is WONDERFUL! I look forward to nicer weather and longer walks.

The kids play with her in the evening, when she gets the zoomies and goes around and around the living room couch. She is good at fetch and tug of war, and both of these games tire her right out. She sleeps all night long and through my morning exercise routine. She is less fond of riding in the car than she was when she was super tiny, but she is happy to lie down in her crate while I do the afternoon kid run. I have been too tired and cold to take her for a night walk when we get home (and the girls have been too hungry), but I can see how this would be a good addition to her schedule. I am not sure I can swing it the nights Ben is away, but I am going to give it a try. (Honestly, it would be good for me because it is my very crabbiest time of day-- I am going to try to make this work).

(It's hard right now because Jack is the rail manager for the spring musical, plus it is diving season for his high school team, plus the speech season is starting, plus he has a job teaching swim lessons 4 nights a week, plus he has 2 AP classes and it's the end of the semester, so he is not often home to watch kids for me. And! Cooper dives until 8 4 nights a week. Maybe I could take her out at 8 after Minnie is in bed??)

I look forward to her being confident in her ability to go up and down stairs (very scared of them right now), so she can play in the backyard. Spring maybe??

5 on a Friday: Things About Annabel (47/52)

 1. Dorothy delights in Annabel's utter viciousness. Like, I think this teeny, prissy little dog would love to kill and eat a rodent. It is SO fun to play tug of war with her and listen to her fierce growl. She does that charming thing that dogs do when they show all of their teeth at once. Her little black eye widen until we can see the whites-- it's pretty cute. Here she is trying to eat Dorothy's hair and face:

2. She is SO NICE, even when we do things she doesn't like. Things like take her on a rode down a slide and make her wear sweaters (pictured). Also, everyday things like use a coconut scented pet wipe to get the poop out of her tail fur (she's getting a little shave at the vet on Friday), giving her a bath, picking her up to get her out of a room we'd rather she not be in (ANY ROOM WITH CARPET). She's very good at making her opinions known but also understanding her place in the pack (to be clear-- she is pretty sure that she outranks Minnie). 

3. She is getting WAY BETTER at going on walks, which is a delight for all of us. I cannot even wait to buy her a puffy coat and some itty bitty boots.

4. She's still only 3.1 pounds, meaning she is really fun to just scoop up and squeeze-- even when she growls a little. Especially when she growls a little?

5. She loves nothing more than stealing speedos, socks, and sports bras from the laundry and absconding to her bed with them.

I want to reiterate that Annabel has a very sweet and lovely disposition-- but also the way she growls reminds me so much of my dad's old 3-legged Westie Tripod (I loved that dog, but also, I think I was the only person in the world she didn't bite)

Hi-- a brief (re)introduction

 I love seeing new names in the comments section, so I thought I'd back up and say HELLO to anyone new around here.

First of all, SORRY FOR THE TYPOS. My eyes are getting worse and worse, and I can never find glasses, and I never really learned to type properly because I am a gen x-er. 

OK-- here are the quick facts:

I have five kids: Harry(18), a college freshman; Jack (16), a junior in high school; Cooper (13), a 7th-grader; Dorothy (11), a 6th-grader; and Minnie (4), a preschooler.

We have a brand new puppy named Annabel. She's a cavapoo and was born on 8/24.

I am married to Ben, my high school and college sweetheart (we met at speech camp when we were 14 and 15). He is an academic, too, but an administrator, and he works out of town 3 days (2 nights) a week.

I had Harry and Jack when I was getting my PhD and the other 3 after I had settled into my full-time teaching faculty job.

We generally have... a lot... going on, and I like to use this blog to complain about... all of it.

I write about money on Mondays because we are trying to be smarter about how we use ours. Every month, I post a reading round up because I have made an effort since 2013 to read at least 100 books a year. I am a huge feminist and probably politically to the left of you because I am politically to the left of everyone I know even in a super lefty area of the state. I study reproductive justice and am doing a lot of thinking about gender and politics these days. I want to be a novelist and have been working on a book about adult mean girl friendships in the WI suburbs forever. I try to comment on blogs for 20 minutes a day and also sometimes reply to comments on this blog but I am bad at that and getting better. I always want to be thinner and younger looking, color my hair at home, am contemplating botox and maybe new boobs, am very anxious most of the time and generally always think I have a fatal ailment of some sort. I AM SO FUN AT PARTIES YOU GUYS.

Anyway, welcome. 

Oh gosh-- speaking of fun places my money has gone lately...

 WE GOT A NEW PUPPY!!

Blog friends, meet ANNABEL SQUISHMALLOW (Minnie chose her middle name). She is a cavapoo and was born on 8/24. Friday at the vet, she weighed a whopping 2 pounds, 13 ounces, and we love her so much already.

Seriously, you guys. She is like a little wind up dog toy.

Minnie is SMITTEN and very smug about being the only kid who got to go pick her up from her (pretty idyllic) farm. (The others met her the weekend before we got to bring her home though)

She hung out on my lap in the car the whole time Dorothy had ballet on Friday, and now she is pretty sure I am her bio mom.

She is VERY SWEET. Like, she hated her bath but she was so nice about it (a thousand treats really helped).

When she has had enough of constant playing and adoration, she puts herself down for a nap in her crate.

Everyone adores her, of course

I actually think she's really smart (it's ok to roll your eye at me) because she's super expressive, and it is really easy to tell when she needs to go outside. She's also really getting the hang of walking with a leash (it helps to have someone in front of you with treats. We got these little heart-shaped puppy training treats, and each one is about 6 servings for her-- that's how teeny tiny she is.)

It took her about a day to be comfortable enough around us to eat and drink. The first night she was home, she ate about 6 pieces of kibble and just sort of gently put her tongue in her water (but only the water in her collapsable travel bowl and only if I was holding her and the bowl). She slept all night the first night in a small crate on our bedroom floor, and when she woke up the next morning (she is SO CUTE in the morning because she's all messy and disheveled with bed head only all over her body), she peed and pooped and then ate breakfast and drank a TON of water, and she's been in the groove since then.

The farm was feeding her a pretty cheap brand of food, and we want to use Blue Buffalo, so we've been mixing the two. and her stomach has been fine. We do free feeding, so it's hard to estimate how much she's getting, but the vet said you really cannot overfeed a puppy.

So far, she has slept all night long every night (please universe, do not let me have just screwed that up by typing those words), and I think it's because she is getting SO MUCH ACTIVITY during the day. By the time the dinner hour rolls around, she is EXHAUSTED and naps a bit on and off from about 6-10:30 when we all go to bed. I bought a Snuggle Puppy, and she seems to really like it-- might be helping her sleep? She sleeps in a big crate in the laundry room right next to the dryer. (Our laundry room is ridic now, but it was pretty terrible before, so **shrug**). Eventually, I hope she just sleeps on the couch or in her little dog bed or with Dorothy on on the old American Girl bed Dorothy dreams of her sleeping in.

I am worried that she might wake up during my work out time when Ben is out of town (although she slept until almost 7 on Monday), and I am not totally sure how I will work around that since we are not letting her be anywhere unsupervised right now to help her get the hang of going outside to pee and poop. I think maybe I will take her on a little walk until it's 6 and then give her to a kid to snuggle for a bit while I jump on the elliptical. I feel like she'll be a good addition to yoga, actually-- like a tiny goat. I am also concerned that when everyone is at school and she has either some time by herself taking a nap or is just home with a boring WFH grown up, she might not be as exhausted by bedtime as she is over the weekend. She's going to be my car buddy for the evening drop off/pick up slog (maybe she will make it more fun??), but I think she'll sleep a lot then, too. Also! She shivers outside, and it is like 60-degrees, so we gotta buy some dog clothes (Dorothy is ALL IN for this!).

We are SO EXCITED to have 4 little paws thumping around the house again.