Good Dog

We have lived in this house for six years now and my dog still stands at the wrong side of the door waiting to get out. Like a misbehaving toddler from the 1950s, she stands with her nose in the corner. I have to scooch her back as I open the door at the other side and herd her around to that side, avoiding snowflakes and blasts of cold air that are gaining ground in this bizarre spring.
The dog was a bribe to the kids, brought by Santa the year we moved from Michigan, leaving behind a tight group of friends and godparents. In this friendless city, my husband drove to a farm and picked a chestnut brown puppy with floppy ears. She slept in an oversized dog kennel under the Christmas tree that night with a big red bow around her neck. The next morning she never left my 6-year-old daughter’s arms. My daughter named her Rosie, because she thought that brown fur had a reddish tint to it.
Rosie is eight years old now and mostly my thoughts of her have to do with vacuuming up dog hair and picking up dog doo in the backyard. She barks if anyone has the audacity to walk along the street in front of our house and she remains at the bottom of the pack, even under the paw of the kitten we got last summer.
My daughter Grace was certain she could turn this mutt into a show dog. She set up obstacle courses and ran her through them, along balance beams and through tunnels. Grace tried making her a sled dog, attaching the wagon to her ample sides and having her pull small children through the streets. Grace’s last efforts were teaching the dog to be a jumping dog. Grace would pull molded plastic chairs into the center of the backyard and place a long hockey stick across the seats. With pockets full of treats and a long leash, she would jump the stick, her newly elongated legs flying through the air. Rosie would follow sometimes, her belly barely grazing the stick. Other times she would simply stop, nearly pulling Grace’s arm out of socket as the leash jerked to a stop.
This fall, Rosie started limping. We probably waited a month before we took her to the vet, thinking it might go away. The vet diagnosed an old knee injury that was probably getting arthritis. He gave her a cortisone shot and sent us home. We went back two more times for pain medicine as her limp became worse. In March, the knee was so swollen and she was in obvious pain. This time, the doctor did an x-ray. He called me and my now 15-year-old daughter back to look at the x-ray.
A bone tumor.
Where her femur should have been straight and white, the bones seemed to wander off into their own curling paths.
Grace held it together until we returned to the examining room. She sat down, refusing to look at the dog. Tears streamed down Grace’s face as I petted the dog’s soft fur around her ears and neck.
“She doesn’t know why your sad, Grace,” I said.
My husband and I took her to the Veterinarian Oncologist and our very sensible friends refrained from laughing at us. But after two hours listening to the doctor explain chemotherapy treatments and the cost of amputation, we walked out having decided to make Rosie’s life as comfortable as possible. With all of the treatments, they could predict a 10- to 16-month life expectancy. She had already beaten the odds. A dog with this type of bone tumor normally only lives five months. Rosie had been diagnosed six months previously.
So, now I think about the dog much more. I give her medicine every morning and evening. I let her sleep on the living room rug rather than in her kennel. I feed her treats and trip over her chew bones. I’m careful when I open the door to let her out, trying not to brush her sore leg and leaning way into the spring snow to avoid hitting her with the screen door.
She has been the best bribe I ever gave my children.

Education Pushers

My fifteen-year-old daughter is starting college today.
It’s not that we try to be overachievers. I’ve noticed that we are not alone in pushing our kids to do more, faster.
This morning’s paper talks about how middle school kids can earn high school credit if they extend class time by 10 minutes. That’s it? That’s the difference between a high school class and a middle school class?
One friend’s son is hoping to get into a program where he takes classes at DeVry for the last two years of high school. He won’t go to high school. He’ll only go to DeVry and then he’ll graduate from high school with an associate’s degree.
What’s the rush?
Why do our kids need high school credit in middle school and college credit in high school?
A similar program stretches high school to five years, but again, once they graduate they will have an associate’s degree. What are they going to do with that extra year? Will they simply finish four-year colleges at 21? Does that mean they are rushing out to the job market?
Maybe that gives them an extra year to backpack around Europe and Asia or join the Peace Corps or City Year. Maybe they will take that extra year that we rushed them through and give something back to the community.
But I wonder if they’ll even know how to relax once we finish pushing them to their full potential.
Grace is terrified to step into that college classroom this morning. She is taking biology and French.
We have homeschooled since Grace was in first grade. Now she thinks she might want to go to high school next year as a sophomore. Looking at what she has studied, I figured she needed a language and a science credit, thus the biology and the French class.
And, I’m not worried about how well she’ll do in class. She’s smart. She can keep up academically.
It’s just getting her to take that first step across the threshold and preventing myself from shoving too hard.

Chickens

The rain was blowing almost sideways while I sat in the parking lot at the zoo waiting for Grace and her friend Eleanor. They came out the exit, their look alike heads bent against the rain,although Grace was several inches taller. Eleanor's hair a little redder, but the haircuts the same with a curtain of bangs pushed to the side ending along their cheekbones and the rest stretching in choppy layers to their shoulders. They were dressed alike too in their khaki pants and khaki zoo shirt with the green logo. And they were smiling. Tonight was the Girl Scout sleepover at the Holiday Inn across the street from the University. No parents, just two leaders -- three doors away.
They opened the rear door and blew into the car with some rain.
"Hmmm, bagels," Grace said, spotting the open Panera box. She started spreading cream cheese on a cinnamon crunch while I started driving. I still had to drop the girls off at the scout leader's house, along with the leader's son who was in the way back of my car, and get my sons to swim team. Five kids in the car, 13 bagels eaten or fading fast.
"How was the zoo?" I asked. The girls had complained that their volunteer time at the zoo often resulted in a lot of dish washing. They were constantly washing the bowls that hold the animals' food. One held pinkies, which are some sort of embryo mice or something.
Why doesn't the zoo have a dishwasher -- you know, a machine like GE or Kenmore? Grace wasn't certain, but she said the washing machine sits in the middle of the hallway, so they may be lagging on some essentials.
"Good," Grace said, her mouth full of bagel while she answered my question about her day. "We got to feed the chicken."
"Chicken? Why does the zoo have a chicken?" And why isn't the chicken fed to the tigers, was what I wondered silently.
We were zooming down the highway by this point, having evaded the stop and go traffic that led us back to the highway.
"I don't know, but it's name is Gracie," she said, chewing.
"Yeah, we fed it meal worms," Eleanor said.
"Grace touched the meal worms?" I asked in surprise. I knew that Grace's contribution when it came to worms, snakes or bugs in general would be minimal. When the girls were told to clean the Hissing Cockroach cage, Grace's participation was limited to trying to scare the cockroach away from the opening while Eleanor took care of the cleaning and feeding. I'm not certain what her tactic was for scaring it -- perhaps she hissed back.
"Well, I didn't exactly touch them," she hedges with a shake of her shoulders as if disgusted at the thought of touching the meal worms. "I kind of turned the can sideways and dropped some out."
"Yeah, and we were supposed to do them one at a time," Eleanor protested. "After that, the chicken wouldn't leave Grace. It just stayed with her hoping for another worm bonanza."
They both laughed, showing mouths full of bagel and cream cheese and braces.
"Yeah," she turned in the seat toward her 10-year-old brother, "the chicken kind of reminded me of Tucker."
"Hey," he protested.
"Why," I asked, "did the chicken remind you of Tucker?"
"Well," she said tilting her head to the side as if trying to find the best way to explain it, "I think it was the facial expressions."
I spent the rest of the drive pondering what sort of facial expressions the chicken could possibly have, but afraid to ask for more details. Sometimes, with teenagers, it's best not to know.

Coaches

I realize that sports coaches probably hope to achieve different goals than I do as a mother. I want my kids to learn how to play sports and to enjoy playing sports. Coaches just want to win. Still, I wonder if I am somehow a magnet for incompetent coaches or if every coach out there is incredibly BAD!!
Ironically, we decided to let my son play in the Catholic leagues, thinking ... what that the players wouldn't be as apt to use foul language and insult each other? Thinking that the coaches would be using Christ as a role model?
Some people might have wised up last year when the football coach was talking to a group clustered around him and he suddenly beaned one of the kids in the head with the football. Luckily, it was his own kid.
This year, new coach. An old guy who has been coaching forever. Why did I think that would be better? At one point during the season, he told the boys that they were the worst team he has ever had. Perhaps it's true, but not exactly inspiring. Then he told them they sent him to the hospital with chest pains because they are so bad. When my son came to me concerned, I told him the coach was a grown up and he needed to decide how much stress he could take.
Now we're on to basketball and, so far, his team has lost every game, although one game was close. Another new coach. This one is younger with a 5-year-old as his oldest child. Apparently he doesn't like losing either. He told the boys last game that if they couldn't beat the team they were playing, they might as well cancel the rest of the season. Guess what? They didn't win.
When my son asked the coach about practice Friday night, he said there wasn't much point in practice for this team.
All of this is culminating, in a kid who actually still loves sports. And if losing and lame coaching make for character, my son is brimming with it.

Glamour Life

It's six a.m. and so far I've fed the cats, cleaned up the sink, taken about 50 vitamins, emptied the dehumidifier and cleaned up cat puke. No wonder I never get any writing done.
I'm going to run, then I'm leaving and taking my computer with me. I vow to get some writing done this morning.

Paulita's Ponderings

I didn't really mean to start this blog. Iwas only trying to respond to Allison's blog and I had to jump through all of these hoops.
Anyway, I would love to set a goal of writing 1000 words a day.
When I write, I use single space, then later I go back and change it to double space. So 1000 words would be two full pages. Better than my current output, which for this week stands at 0 (I wish I could make that a capital zero.)