.....I think about why on earth I didn't wash the dogs BEFORE the long weekend. Oh, well. It spices up the usually faintly mournful Sunday night.
I'll tell you one thing. Three dogs is one dog too many. We have 3 adopta-dogs, two from the pound and one from a friend who had Nyx left in her back yard. We could handle 2 dogs. But the third has caused untold misery. Only thing is, we love her now, and we can do nothing about the situation. Plus, she is the McKid's biggest fan (and the McKid is hers). McKid called me this weekend just to remind me, "MamaT, Nyx is MY DOG!" Right, baby.
All of our dogs are weird--a product of their hard beginnings I suppose. LuckyDog is afraid of much, but a loud barker. She is also the author of all those clouds of white dog hair that coat the surfaces of my house. If she spent 1/2 the time she spends growing hair (so that it can fall out on my floor) on growing some body fat, workmen who come to my house would not greet me with suspicion: "Lady, that's the skinniest dog I've ever seen. Do you feed her?" Yeah, we do, and yeah she's the Twiggy of dog-dom.
Maggie is some terrier mix--part Schnauzer and all bark and need. She is truly the neediest dog I've ever met. Zteen locks her out of his room while he is playing his video games, because she spends all her time trying to climb into his lap. Once he tried to pet her continually until she got tired of it and walked away. ONE SOLID HOUR LATER, he gave in, took her outside and shut his door. No amount of love is too much for her. Really no amount is even ENOUGH for her.
And then there's Nyx. The abandoned. The "probably bred for dog-fighting but way too scaredy to fight, so dropped off in a random backyard" dog. She cannot stand to be without the other two. If one of them is in the yard, Nyx stands in the house and cries until they come back. She needs her posse, or she can't be happy. Oh, and she's a chewer on top of that. She's been the most expensive dog we've ever owned. One chair, one set of curtains and several dogbeds later, we're doing better. The logical thing to do would be to give her away, but the heart doesn't know logic. This is the dog that will stand between the McKid and anyone else in the world if she thinks they are being mean to McK. She loves who she loves. And she loves them always.
Part of me thinks I should do the sensible thing and cut down the number of dogs around here. But love isn't about being sensible, is it? It'd be different if we weren't able to take care of them, or if our child was allergic to them. Believe me, I don't treat our dogs like children. They're dogs. But at the same time, they are lovely God-given companions on this journey. For me, there is no therapy that can match a dog head on the knee or a dog wrapped across my feet as I type.
So we soldier on at Casa S, putting up with inconvenience and trouble, and hoping that somewhere, sometime, someone will do the same for us.....
life has been so much more pleasant since we adopted out our third, our red-headed stepchild, ling. soooooooooo much more pleasant. mine may be an unpopular opinion, but i think some people become far too attached to these four-legged creatures. especially in recent years as people have sterilized themselves on purpose and taken to adopting animals as children. . .well, it's sorta disgusting iffin you ask me. this weekend i actually saw a sweatshirt that read "i love my granddog." how pathetic is that?
I couldn't have done what you did, Smock. Unless my kids were allergic to dogs or something. I'm glad it worked for you.
no m'am. the really sad part is that ling was gone four days, FOUR DAYS, before the kids even noticed. how sad is that! of course nyx is a totally different story becuase McKid would be heartbroken.
i swear to you that when i told my mom the story, she laughed so hard she almost wet herself. she said, "good lord, please don't ever call me and tell me it took four days to notice one of the children was missing!"
OK, so I thought I would browse through the website and check out the latest postings. (I don't get to do this often enough to see most of what goes on here, but when I think of it, I love to stop in!)
Indeed, it is true. The McKid would be heartbroken should anything happen to Nyx. I think about this often. But, all the wishing in the world doesn't seem to make it more possible for us to give Nyx the home that she needs and keep our life simple at the same time. (I don't believe in keeping animals pinned up inside, or outside for that matter.)
Perhaps if I could get beyond the "ideal" of animal owning, and onto the more practial...I just can't stand all the HAIR on everything in the house. Nonetheless, Nyx does have a place in our hearts as well, and everytime I see her attempts to "protect" McKid from something, I always picture her asleep beside McKid at night in place of me! (Wow! is that how I get McKid out of my bed and into her own?!!!)
A girl and her dog.....who am I to stand between!