She’s In a Better Place

This post is about my dog, Lucy, who’s not dead—she’s just in a better place.    She’s visiting Nana.    Our whole family loves Lucy, but since we’ve had two children she just doesn’t get the attention she used to.   It’s not that we don’t want to spend time doing things with her, it’s mostly that children take up huge tracts of time out of your day and what’s left over is mostly of the kind, “mom would just like to sit down for a bit.”

There are conflicts that need help in being resolved, laundry that needs doing, fun projects, dishes, more conflicts that need help in being resolved, injuries that need tending to, responses to, “mommy!” that need answering, baths that need giving and countless other things that make children both a delight and an exhausting venture all at the same time.

At the end of the night I come downstairs to write this blog post and usually the dog follows me.   Frequently she pulls off her little bed this old, bedraggled porcupine hand puppet that has always been her favorite toy.   You need to put your hand into it, get on the floor and make it come alive for her and she tries to catch it.    She’s old and has arthritis so the playing phase doesn’t take that much time to make her happy, but sadly, I don’t play the porcupine game with her as much as my conscience tells me I should.

Insert Nana into the picture and my dog has the life I want her to have.   Nana takes her for walks, makes her special treats, pets her through entire television shows, drives her around in her car, takes her to Lowes and basically enriches her life.   Here’s a picture from Nana today with the caption, “convertible dog”.

Do we miss our dog?  Absolutely.   I miss her company.   I miss her doing her bow to me when I come home.   We (as in my husband and I) also miss her hoover capabilities.   I’ve said it before but it bears mentioning again—my children are a crumby mess with food.   With the dog around, not a crumb needs to be swept or vacuumed up.

She’ll come home in another week, but I’m in no rush because I know any time Lucy is with Nana, she’s a happy, well-loved dog.

The Big Boy Update:  My son didn’t want to hear the book his sister selected the other night at bedtime.    He was having none of it.   He told me, “fine, I’ll just read my catalog.”   And he did.   He loves catalogs of toys.   He looked at page after page until it was time to turn out the lights.   He wanted to take the catalog to bed even.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I was talking to my daughter about clothes and somehow my mother came up.    My mom likes to wear a shirt with stars on the front sometimes when she comes over.   My children have liked talking to Mimi about her stars for a long time.   When I mentioned the star shirt to my daughter she said, “no she doesn’t wear that one anymore, she wears the one with all the colors in the mountains.”   My mother had been wearing a shirt just like my daughter described.     Some of her vision is truthfully terrible—she regularly can’t fine the utensils in front of her while she’s eating—but if you help her look at something, she does understand what she’s seeing.

Tumbler Update:  Twenty-four hours after plugging it in and it’s still rotating.  It’s an old machine that hasn’t been run in a long time.   Twenty-seven more days to go.