My buddy, Jack

It's been a hard few days, which is why I haven't had a chance to post in a while.

This weekend we had to place our youngest dog, Jack, in a new home. It started about a week ago.

Jack is a cocker spaniel; a honeymoon baby that we purchased at the mall pet store after he was deeply discounted, apparently because no one would buy him. He was adorable, friendly, and was getting to an age where it would be pretty unlikely that he'd find a good home.

We took him in and fell in love with him right away. He got along great with our other two dogs and he brought a lot of life to the house. He was always a little off…acting a little bit like an abused dog (perhaps he was at some point). He would growl occasionally for no reason and would get fearful and submissive if he thought you were upset, such as if you caught him peeing in the house during potty training.

So he had his quirks, but he was a good dog and he was a lot of fun. Lately, he has been particularly energetic and difficult to deal with, and I was getting frustrated with him. After a long day of Jack getting in trouble, I tried to make amends right before bed. I got down on the floor with him, pet him for a while, and then leaned in to give him a kiss on the head.

Out of nowhere, he bit me. It was hard enough to break the skin on my arm and cause some pretty significant bruising. If I had been the baby, it could have broken a bone or left a scar – the thought of which made me physically ill.

He has always been great with the baby, and he was clearly her favorite dog, but we just couldn't take the chance of something happening down the road…maybe in a week, maybe five years from now. If it was just me, I would have kept him. The little guy weight 20 pounds and isn't exactly menacing. But with the baby in the house, we really didn't have any choice but to send him away.

Next came the task of finding a home for an apparently aggressive dog. Most shelters wouldn't even take him and I was getting to the point where I was afraid he would need to be euthanized.

Meanwhile, as the days passed, I was keeping Jack on a leash and at my side…which made things harder as he and I were joined at the hip while we were trying to sort this out. He was being a good dog for me and every night I spent with him completely broke my heart.

As always, I was spending about an hour a night with him outside, playing fetch and running around. He has completely boundless energy, which I think probably contributes to him getting a little stir crazy sometimes.

By an unbelievable stroke of good fortune, my mother-in-law managed to find someone at her job that was a perfect fit. He had grown kids and lived on a farm, complete with other dogs and assorted barnyard animals. Jack has never showed any aggression towards animals and his potential new family were familiar with dogs (not to mention farm animals) and could create a perfect environment to rehabilitate Jack – lots of land, activity, and attention, so he would be able to blow off steam outside and come in to a good home.

In my mind, even before we learned about this family, I believed that a farm was the very best place in the world for him. So my fingers were quite crosses as we worked towards getting him placed in his new home.

The new family talked it over and decided eagerly that they wanted him. We were thrilled – making the very best of a very crummy situation.

So I took Jack on one last trip to the vet to make sure he was healthy and had all of his shots. He could tell something was wrong and acted completely terrified at the vet. Once they took him to the back room, though, I was told he was happy and friendly. Clearly the vibes I was putting off in those final days weren't going unnoticed – in fact he had seemed downright annoyed by the tears in my eyes when we played our last game of fetch. To me it was goodbye, but to him, I was just being stupid.

After the vet, I met my father-in-law, who took Jack the rest of the way…which I will always appreciate to no end. I could barely hold it together in the gas station parking lot during the handoff, so I'm sure I would have been a wreck if I had to watch him go with his new family.

Later that night, I got an update. He was a little uneasy at first, but after some treats and some fetch, he jumped right into the car with his new family. I'm so happy for the little guy and hope his new home is more suited to his personality than his old suburban one.

So, to close, I figure I'll just share a few things I'll never forget about Jack:

He loved life. His tail was always wagging and he was always so excited about everything. We should all be more like that.

He was a fetch machine. Once I threw him a snowball into a very snowy backyard and went inside. That dog came to the door more than an hour later with the thing in his mouth. When we played with the other dogs I had to hold him back to let the others get the ball sometimes. He was a competitor. 

He loved the baby. Jack used to sit in my lap and let Babe-O tug on his big, floppy ears.   If she was too rough, he would bite his own ear and pull it out of her grasp.

He was my buddy. His name was Jack, but he knew when I said "Buddy," I meant him. He used to sleep in the crook of my arm at night, until we began the no-dogs-in-the-bed policy. Then he started sleeping on the floor right next to me. I was glad to learn that his new family plans to name him "Buddy."

The last few days were just awful – really, really hard and emotionally draining. I guess sometimes it's hard to be a dog person.

 

Duck…duck…goose egg!

So Mom-O went out for a rare evening by herself and left me at home with pretty much one rule: don't send the baby careening down the stairs.

Oops.

Things were going well. Babe-O and I were hanging out upstairs, playing and having a good time. Eventually, she started fussing a little bit, as she's been teething lately. I scooped her up and headed downstairs, where there was an iced washcloth waiting in the freezer.

As soon as my wonderful, cozy Ugg slipper hit the top step, I knew we were in trouble. My toe landed firmly on the edge of the step, but my heel landed on what I knew instantaneously was my dog's red rubber bone, also known as a red rubber tripping hazard.

The bone, and my foot, slid out from under me and both of my legs went up in the air. It's amazing at how many thoughts you can have in a very short period of time:

#1. "Oh shit!"

#2. "Don't fumble the baby!" (as I swung her from the crook of my left arm to a crash position on my chest, wrapped in both arms)

#3. "No arms left to catch self!" (as the back of my head cracked the edge of a hardwood step)

#4. "If I black out, will that happen right away or will I have time to get Babe-O safely to the ground?" (as I slid down the flight of stairs, cracking my head on each step as I went)

#5. "Oh good, I didn't black out." (yippee)

#6. "Do I hear the garage door opening?" (I did.)

I had enough momentum that when I came to a stop, I was lying flat on my back on the floor. Babe-O was cradled across my chest, screaming, but unhurt. In fact, she had already been screaming because of her mouth pain and I'm not sure she realized that there was anything terribly unusual about that particular trip down the stairs.

I was barely back to my feet when Mom-O arrived to find me leaning against the kitchen counter with a screaming baby and in obvious pain.

The baby was easily settled down and we were sharing a shaky, relieved laugh a few minutes later.

I limped away from the thing and kept a persistent headache for the next 24 hours.

Anybody else have any heroic stories where they did something clumsy but managed not to break the baby?

Good morning!?

Last night was a good night. This morning was a little disorienting.

Usually (okay, ideally) the bedtime routine is this: bath at 7:00, dressed for bed at 7:20ish, last feeding at 7:30ish, in the crib shortly thereafter. The night usually involves a few feedings and maybe a diaper change. Babe-O wakes up, fusses a little, I go get her, Mom-O feeds her, and I take her back to her crib.

Last night, it didn't go like that at all. First of all, she didn't go to sleep until about midnight…which is not only way past her bedtime, it's also way past mine.

That wasn't a big deal, though. I had client work to do, so I was going to be up late anyway, and Mom-O was on hand to read drafts and be my second set of eyes. So we are both going to be up one way or another, which made it much less stressful to have our prickly baby refusing to go to bed.

Finally, when my work was done and Babe-O was asleep, we went to bed.

Now keep this in mind: I don't have an alarm clock. I have three dogs, one of which always has to pee (wakeup call). I also have a baby, who gets up a few times each night, including once right about the time I need to be handing her off to her Mom and heading to work.

This morning, I woke up to the sun coming through the window. The dogs were asleep and Babe-O was nowhere to be seen.

In fact, I hadn't seen any of them all night long.

I freaked a little, jumping out of bed and hurrying down the hall to the nursery. There was Babe-O, wide awake and playing with her feet through her sleep sack.

As I opened the door, she turned to look at me and cooed.

She had slept through the night. Then, after she woke up at a very reasonable hour of the morning, she kept herself amused for who knows how long. And the good sleep karma must have been flowing, because the dogs slept through the night, too.

Babe-O and I got up together, made some coffee, and let the dogs out. Then she sat in her bouncer in the bathroom while I showered and got ready for work.

In the meantime, Mom-O was getting another hour of sleep to top off the first good night's sleep she's had in months.

It was just awesome. Here's hoping for a repeat performance tonight.

“Mother ___________”

I'm one of those guys lucky enough to be married to a stay-at-home Mom. And yes, I was once one of those guys who assumed that most stay-at-home Moms divided their daylight hours between changing diapers, running on the treadmill, and sipping vodka martinis.

But that was yesterday.

Today, I am enlightened. That's because this afternoon, I came home from work to see a whole bag of tricks that Babe-O has been carefully cultivating with her Mom's diligent support, day after day.

She can stand up in her crib, clinging to the rail. She can sit on her butt, all by herself. She can roll over, if she wants something close by badly enough.

She's also finding her voice, which is really cute; though I'm told that it causes headaches if you listen to it seven hours a day. She has kind of a jovial, high-pitched squeal that she likes to let rip for long periods of time. Still…you can tell she's working on getting some words out. She will enunciate when she's happy and mutter under her breath when she's mad.

Her first words can't be far off, which might be problematic because her Mom and I haven't quite gotten our potty mouths under control yet. On the plus side, even in the most profane scenario I can think of, Babe-O's first phrase still begins with "mother." In the scrapbook, we'll just leave it at that.