I think anyone reading this knows how much I love my old dog, Scooby, and my puppy, Sophie, but this has not been a good day to own dogs. Rain all day, sometimes heavy, and the backyard is a sea of mud. The path from the back door to the kitchen is lined with old rugs, and I am finally getting Sophie to the point where I can dry her feet and legs without a ferocious battle. But I think she decided this morning to be fractious today: the first thing she did, as I stood right there with the door open for her to go out, was to go to her favorite spot in the playroom and pee. I caught her mid-act and practically threw her oiutside. Then all day, if she's out, she wants to be in; if she's in, she paws at me desperately until I put her out. And of course every re-entry from the outside means all that toweling. I really need to wash their towels and rugs, but when's the chance? I have to leave them down.
Scooby has never let me touch his hind legs, though he'll suffer me drying his front paws. I usually get a treat and make him dance back and forth on those rugs until he doesn't leave footprints. Hmm, maybe if I turn that big rug over I can start fresh. This afternoon I put him in his bed while I napped, and since then every time I inquire politely if he'd like to go out and eat his dinner, he gives me a baleful look. I know when eventualy I put him out he'll dump the dinner all over and it will turn into a soggy mess.
I ate leftovers for lunch and told myself I could have salmon cakes, deviled egg, and pea salad for supper--some of my favorite foods. The eggs didn't come out of the shell easily and were hard to stuff; the salmon cakes never got brown--okay, Mom, I ignored your dictum about soda crackers and used panko, not the same; and I gave up on pea salad and had the broccoli that was in the fridge. None of it tasted quite like I imagined it would. I guess I'll have to eat chocolate.
I'm reading, for review on the Story Circle Network, The Night Sky about about the daughter of two Dachau prisoners, . Her parents were sent to forced labor on a German farm. Though they worked hard and had slight acommodations, they fared much better than most Dachau prisoners. Raised by her mother and stepfather in the U.S., Maria Sutton spent almost forty years searching for her father, in spite of red flag warning that he was not the dashing, courageous, brave and generous Polish military officer she imagined. I suppose such a fantasy is hard to let go of, but as the adoptive parent of four, I wonder about that desperate search for a birth parent. My four seem, as far as I know, to be content with me as their parent, and they are--watch me boast--happy, productive people who are wonderful parents and seem quite well adjusted, always have, to the fact of adoption. I'm not sure how I'd feel if they suddenly, now most in their forties, had to search. I think I would be afraid it was symptomatic of some deeper crisis in their lives. But maybe I'm judging without walking a mile in the other person's moccasins.
Scooby has never let me touch his hind legs, though he'll suffer me drying his front paws. I usually get a treat and make him dance back and forth on those rugs until he doesn't leave footprints. Hmm, maybe if I turn that big rug over I can start fresh. This afternoon I put him in his bed while I napped, and since then every time I inquire politely if he'd like to go out and eat his dinner, he gives me a baleful look. I know when eventualy I put him out he'll dump the dinner all over and it will turn into a soggy mess.
I'm reading, for review on the Story Circle Network, The Night Sky about about the daughter of two Dachau prisoners, . Her parents were sent to forced labor on a German farm. Though they worked hard and had slight acommodations, they fared much better than most Dachau prisoners. Raised by her mother and stepfather in the U.S., Maria Sutton spent almost forty years searching for her father, in spite of red flag warning that he was not the dashing, courageous, brave and generous Polish military officer she imagined. I suppose such a fantasy is hard to let go of, but as the adoptive parent of four, I wonder about that desperate search for a birth parent. My four seem, as far as I know, to be content with me as their parent, and they are--watch me boast--happy, productive people who are wonderful parents and seem quite well adjusted, always have, to the fact of adoption. I'm not sure how I'd feel if they suddenly, now most in their forties, had to search. I think I would be afraid it was symptomatic of some deeper crisis in their lives. But maybe I'm judging without walking a mile in the other person's moccasins.
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