I want this dog’s life.

Bad dog mom that I am, I had almost forgotten that today is Molly’s birthday!

I always think her birthday is in February, but that’s actually the anniversary of the day we drove 20 hours round trip in a sleeting-sideways blizzard to pick her up in Missouri, Rob grumbling the whole way there about how he doesn’t want a non-human living in his house, and then the woman pulled from the back of her Suburban this quivering ball of fuzz, sopping in its own vomit and urine, and Rob took one look, gasped audibly and exclaimed, ”Look at that face!” the way only a man smitten with an animal baby can. And then Molly clung fearfully to me the whole way home, and I didn’t just tolerate it but almost kind of liked it, and it occurred to me that that is the way mothers must feel about their babies’ poop — not only is it just not that bad, but its endearing to the point of being pleasant. Almost. Especially if the poor thing is sick and frightened and clinging to you for dear life, and all you want in the world is for her to know she’s safe and to wag her tail.

Happy Birthday, Molly! Today you are three years old. Now that the Terrible Twos are behind us, I expect you will comport yourself with the civility and decorum befitting of your age.

To that end, instead of complaining about how horrendous of a little monster you can be, I’ll share some footage of you being the very dear little doggie that I love.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy birthday, Molls!

Where’d that last month go?

The holidays have come and gone, leaving behind an exponentially growing heap of work on my desk, a good eight extra pounds on my ass, and a million little pine needles all over the floor, all of which, for the life of me, I can’t seem to manage to vacuum up.

Let’s recap quickly, shall we?

Our annual Christmas party returned this year with a bang (and, of course, a John Bang!), after a yearlong hiatus while we were in Nashville. (Did I seriously live in Nashville? I can hardly remember.) It just didn’t feel like the holidays last year without inviting all eight million of our nearest and dearest to come over and trash our house. The good news is, I only got a picture of the “before.” I wish my house looked like this all the time:

Note the overwhelming presence of bacon-wrapped items:

Actually, apart from waking up to an arctic breeze flowing through my living room through an open window (!!!!), the collateral damage this year was far less extensive than what I remember from the past, though perhaps I had too many glasses of champagne to notice. A special shout-out to the girliest girls I know, Elizabeth and Abbie, who took over the kitchen and, I suspect, refilled my glass when I wasn’t looking. Let it flow, girls, just let it flow.

Christmas Eve and Day proved mild and, dare I say, almost a little boring? Nary a tear was shed (and I kept myself together pretty good, too) in our Honda CR-V as Rob and I raced back and forth between family parties, counting the minutes to ensure we were spending precisely the same amount of time with each family. We used to feel a crushing sense of guilt that we were Ruining Everyone’s Christmas and Beloved Family Traditions for our parents and siblings, but this year, either they stopped caring, or we did. It was awesome.

This is not to say that the holidays didn’t bring about the requisite drama. Christmas Eve (and Day) found me in the midst of eight dog fights, at least 25 Jews eating ham, a five-hour drive from Chicago to Highland Park, one ball-in-a-cup smackdown, two Mexican “hired help”-ers admiring my wedding album, one Korean Jazzercise instructor telling me how I look much less fat now than I do in my wedding album, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Mmmmm …. ham.

Mexico’s favorite game for over 100 years!

¡Qué gorda la novia! 

Molly, before going postal, holiday-style, on Autumn (my next dog will be a golden retriever):

and, of course, the grand finale:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, no celebration of The Birth of Our Savior Jesus Christ would be complete without a group of Jews singing church hymns in four-part harmony around the hearth. Can you spot the Holocaust survivor? (Hint: She’s 95 and has the best seat in the house.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, my head nearly exploded the first time I experienced this bizarre ritual, too.

But such commitment to wholesomeness, so fervent as to transcend social and religious norms, certainly could not limit itself to just one holiday. And so, for those of you who still don’t believe that Rob’s family has a Thanksgiving talent show and a sing-a-long, including such beloved hippie family classics as “Feelin’ Groovy,” “This Land Is Your Land” and “You’ve Got A Friend,” I give you my new family, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”:

(Just kidding, sort of. This is a little song by my friend Dan Fogelberg, about love, family, growing up, and the poignancy of life.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s see, where was I?

The new year sort of flew under the radar. I resolved to blog closer to daily than to monthly, and I promptly failed. My friends Liz and Joel have vowed to keep me on my toes, though — Joel because he misguidedly thinks I am hilarious, and Liz because she was getting really damn sick of looking at that ultrasound at the top of my blog for so long, for crying out loud, there are babies everywhere! – so you can all thank them for this gratuitously long entry.

Perhaps if I start blogging more often, Rob will start keeping his own new year’s resolutions. Sadly, I have yet to experience more than even the slightest hint that Rob might be giving me a back rub, in spite of his resolution to do so, and despite the fact that he knows full well what’s in it for him. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you know what I mean.

Though I have to hand it to my husband: he is coming home from work at a reasonable hour.  I suspect, however, that this has more than a little something to do with his brand new speakers. He loosens his tie, pours himself some bourbon, and settles in on the couch, flipping through the unending library of music on TiVo Rhapsody and listening to some tunes, man, all the while tuning out the rest of the world (including, say, his wife, or a dog whimpering by the door to be let out).

Speaking of Molly, she is about two incidents away from going to the glue factory. Apart from developing an overly dominant state of being (that’s Dog Whisperer-speak for getting into some nasty dog fights), she remains a mischevious holy terror around the house.

Because she can no longer have her head in the garbage for what amounts to a good four hours of the day (Abbie had the brilliant idea of turning the garbage can around), Molly has now redoubled her effort to retrieve food from the counter. The other day, while I was attempting to make corn chowder, I left on the counter a mixing bowl with two cups of whole milk (for which I had made a special trip to the store, and that I had just measured out and poured the rest down the drain) while I ran in the office to look at the recipe on the (laptop) computer (that I very well could have brought into the kitchen, but that would have made too much sense).

CRASH! SPLASH! Wait … splash?!?

I came running into the kitchen to find milk EVERYWHERE.

Note the tail in the background. Not pictured: the milk dripping from the tops of the cabinets and — I kid you not — the ceiling.

And, of course, that was the end of the corn chowder. It was the end of a really bad day, and I’m not gonna lie: I cried. I cried over spilled milk.

It has been snowing a lot, which has meant that I’ve been outside shoveling. We live in a condo building, and of course we are paying someone to do this kind of thing for us — not that he has done it in, oh, about four of the five years I’ve lived here, not that I’m counting, but the condo president refuses to fire him, and he happens to be the same neighbor that tried to punch me, so I’m not going anywhere near this one. (Wait, have I not told you that story yet?)

Anyway, I do a lot of shoveling. We all know my affinity for mindless household tasks and manual labor, such as painting the mantel or installing light fixtures, so I can’t exactly play the martyr.

Molly adores the snow and is thrilled when I ask her if she wants to “go shovel.” She treats a snowy day like a crime scene investigation, shoving her nose, then her snout, then her face and entire head into the snow banks, sniffing relentlessly to verify the identity of the culprit that has covered her entire world in this cold white stuff. Once she uncovers a piece of evidence — be it a stick, a piece of cloth, or a McDonald’s cheeseburger wrapper — she flings it up in the air and bounds over and through the snow, prancing around with trash hanging out of her mouth like she won a prize.

It’s good entertainment.

Here she is, enjoying a frigid afternoon and beautiful “wintry mix”:

Because she’s a cute dog, my neighbors assume (and insist) that she should be wearing a sweater, or at least some doggie boots. But I swear, Molly could live out in that snow and never get cold. When it’s time to go in, she puts on her best pathetic face and pleads for five more minutes.

Some days, I have half a mind to just leave her out there.

Have I suitably made up for having missed an entire month? I hope so. Even I’m getting sick of me by now.

America voted, and, I’m sorry, but Yoda was just not happening.

Yoda was a hilarious costume, to be certain, but given that half my block greets Molly as “Hello there, little piggy!” I just could not resist parading her around the neighborhood in this costume:

Rob and I dressed up as Juno and Paulie Bleeker again, which I am shamelessly posting here because it attracts so many visitors to my site, and because I am still so freaking proud of myself.
 

I have to say, this Halloween I felt very torn. On the one hand, my friends’ little kids and all the kids on my block were just so cute, I almost — almost — felt like I might be able to begrudgingly join that scene.

On the other hand, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I will loathe pregnancy so much that it may not even be worth having children. The very moment I finished Ace-bandaging that pillowcase stuffed with towels to my self, I got really cranky. And hot, and easily tired, and sweaty and hungry and wanted to go home before midnight even more than I usually do.

Anyway, our friends had some very creative costumes, ranging from “Barry the Plumber” (Barry: Can I borrow a wrench? Amanda: You don’t own a wrench? Barry: What do you think I am, a gentile?) to a (very much in character) communist dictator (he) and a nuclear missile (she). See photo stream at right.

And of course, it just wouldn’t be Halloween unless one of my male friends showed up as a ballerina:

That man is in charge of a city, folks. An entire CITY.

Molly apparently thinks I’m too juicy, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note the complete lack of remorse. And the black socks.

That’s it. Molly and I are on a diet.

Back in Nashville, when a friend started calling Molly a hippo, I didn’t think anything of it. When we went on our honeymoon and the dog sitter reported to us that she had started feeding Molly a scant cup of dog food — rather than a heaping cup, as I instructed her — I shrugged it off.

And when the woman down the block started telling Molly how nice and plump she is these days, I just added it to the list of all the unsolicited, judgmental “advice” she gives me. I mean, this is the woman who, when we run into her and her dog on the street, feels welcome trying to teach Molly commands (it never works) and who has no qualms about hunkering down next to Molly and saying, “Now be sure to tell Mommy that you would like to start going to doggie obedience school, OK?” And then she goes along on her merry way, perfect golden retriever prancing alongside her. Like that’s a hard breed to train.

But now, it seems that everyone we meet on our walks has a comment about Molly’s weight: What are you feeding her? Because you know you shouldn’t give them as much as it says on the dog food label and My, my, looks like someone gets a lot of treats at home! and Whoa, she’s huge! I’ve never seen such a big Wheaten!

And then there’s my personal favorite, the direct hit: Wow, she’s really getting fat!

Um, excuse me? Since when is it OK to say something like that? I wouldn’t dream of telling you that your kid is looking fat these days. My my, little Bobby’s really going at those desserts. Looks like he’ll be in the husky sizes in no time!

And I can’t help but take it personally. I mean, I feed Molly exactly what it says on the label of her ultra-premium expensive dog food. She gets one dental hygiene bone a day, and almost no treats. And she never gets table scraps. Ever.

I took this post down a few weeks ago because Rob insisted it was boring, but I have since gotten quite a few complaints. So, back by popular demand, here is a post from May 9:

It was kind of quiet around here today, so I figured I’d liven things up a bit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And that’s just from getting her ears cleaned. You can’t imagine what happens after she gets a bath. Wheaten Terriers aren’t big on hygiene.

When Tiffany and Rosie were in town, we went to PetCo to pick up a bag of NutriDent bones to replace the entire bag that Rosie ate when we were out. (She also ate a huge bag of pig ears. Let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty.)

At the checkout counter, there was a big cardboard box full of free giveaways, including a 2008 Wheaten Terriers calendar, which the cashier insisted we take.

I protested a bit — what on Earth was I going to do with a dog calendar? — but my genetic makeup trumps my ability to reason when it comes to refusing anything free, so I took it home, with a friend in mind.

This friend’s mother used to insist that their childhood dog liked goats. They have stuffed goat toys for the dog, pictures of goats stuck to the bottom half of the refrigerator, even a framed poster of a mountain goat hung just above the baseboard in their rec room.

So I hung the free dog calendar on the side of the washing machine, near Molly’s food and water bowls.

Now she can enjoy her love of frenzied dog friends over dinner with a new picture of a Wheaten Terrier every month.

I have finally, completely lost my marbles.