burnt toast life

doggy guilt trip

We have a Golden Retriever.

We also have a Jack Russell/Whippet Mix, but he’s not the main subject of my guilt. I don’t know why; I guess it’s just the way my bizarre little mind works.

So here’s the thing. My parents have grandkids, both a boy and two girls. Eric’s parents also have grandkids, and also have both genders represented. While I’ve always wanted to do my part to provide them with more, I’ve never felt obligated to do it. I never felt pressure from my family to have kids.

The place that I am feeling pressure is with my dog. My dog. Yes, it’s insane. But I managed to pick the most stereotypical kid-friendly dog on the planet, through no fault of my own, and literally every time I look into his big brown eyes I think, “Damn, I wish you had a little kid to play with.”

I take pride in saying that both my dogs were adopted, but let’s be honest…Ryder probably would have found a good home even if I hadn’t gotten to him first. He’s a purebred 5th generation Golden Retriever with the papers to prove it and cost his original family $900. But then the Dad of the family was away a lot and the Mom of the family left Ryder in his crate all day, even though she was home all day, which prompted her neighbors to threaten calling animal control. We found out about Ryder’s situation via a forwarded email and took him home two days later.

That’s when the guilt trip started, I think. He was 7 months old and had spent most of his life with this family of three kids. I felt terrible when the little 5-year-old cried as I loaded him into our car, but it wasn’t my fault. I was saving him from her asshole mother who couldn’t be bothered to treat him like part of the family. We took him home and he seemed to like it there, but then we had to go to work. We left him alone for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. We felt awful. We quickly decided that he needed a buddy, and that’s when we adopted Bird.

Ryder and Bird are best buddies, probably out of necessity, but nevertheless it’s better for my anxiety to know they’re hanging out at home together while I’m stuck at work all day. But still. I feel so incredibly guilty that I haven’t blessed them with a baby yet. Both of them, really. Because Bird would love playing with kids, too.

Guilt – is it ingrained in me somehow? I feel guilty when I leave them in the morning, guilty when I get home and I’m too tired to walk them, guilty when they shower me with love and affection that I don’t feel worthy of. Guilty that I can’t give them what they so clearly need. Then I think, hey now, there are dogs out there in the world who are abused and neglected who would kill to have the charmed life that our dogs have, all clean and fed and coddled in a nice warm house. That’s true. But I feel like I owe them more than just the bare necessities.

twins, right?

twins, right?

You wanna know what Ryder is like? Picture the dog from the movie “Up.” The one who says, “Hi, I just met you, but I love you.” He’s a big, dopey oaf who thinks he’s a lapdog even though he weighs 80 lbs. He’s afraid of everything – we have a jug style water dish for the dogs that he refuses to drink out of because one time it made a loud GLUG GLUG noise. He once spent hours “trapped” in the kitchen because our little recycling bin had gotten knocked over in the doorway and he was too terrified to go near it. And don’t even get me started on the vacuum.

The fact of the matter is that he’s stupid. He’s stupid, he’s inbred, he’s easily frightened and he’s also the most gentle, sweetest soul you’ll ever meet. I literally think about his mortality on a daily basis, and wonder how the heck I’m going to survive it when he passes. And then I think, I’m really running out of time here. He’s only 2 and a half; he’s young and energetic and at the perfect age to play with a toddler. What if I don’t have kids until he’s old and feeble? It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to him. I feel like I’m depriving him, and also am depriving those future unborn kids who should really get to meet my Ryder at his best.

And his breed was part of the reason I knew he was perfect. We knew we wanted kids, so a Golden made so much sense. It’s not like you ever hear about children “being attacked by that vicious golden retriever.” That’s not to say that other breeds aren’t great with kids, too…I am 100% pro Pit Bull (as Eric likes to point out, they are the original nanny dog), but I never had dogs before. Goldens are so simple and easy to train. They’re a great starter dog for someone who has no idea what they’re doing. They are the breed that you choose when you have/want kids and you don’t want to worry for one second that it was a bad decision. For this reason, it seems like they belong with kids. And then I take it one step further and think I owe the dog some kids.

This weekend we went camping. The campground had a dog park that we spent a lot of time in, and let me tell you it was awesome. Oh! If you want to hang out with people who aren’t obsessed with kids, go to a dog park. This one woman was practically spitting nails at the little kids from across the street who wandered over to see the dogs from the other side of the fence. Another person threatened to leave if kids came in. I know it doesn’t always hold true, but a lot of times dog people are decidedly not kid people. No one asked me if I had kids or when I planned to have them, that’s for darn sure. They just talked about dog this and dog that for hours on end. It was actually nice.

So anyway. We were at the dog park when an adorable little redheaded girl of about 2 toddled over and started petting Ryder through the chain link. His tail was wagging furiously as he tried to get closer and closer to her chubby little hand. I’m not gonna lie… this scene caused tears to prickle behind my eyes as a million metaphors raced through my mind. There’s a giant fence between him and that little kid he’s supposed to play with. It’s a fence called infertility, miscarriage and injustice. It’s a fence I’m trying to climb with all my might, but I just keep falling down on the wrong side of it. It looks so easy, but it’s just so hard.

Doggy guilt trip. Am I crazy?

scaredy dog

Why, hello! It’s been so long. Long enough to acquire a few more animals, of course. So here’s the current headcount:

2 dogs

8 chickens

5 fish

1 turtle

1 cat

One of these days I’m going to start charging people admission to come over to the Harding Family Petting Zoo. It’s a grand old time.

Anyway, we got this cat. A rescued, 3-year-old, no-one-wants-me-anymore-and-my-owner-is-moving away cat (who is fat). I saw him for approximately 3 seconds on the day he came home before he skittered off to  hide in the basement for 5 days straight. We did not catch a glimpse of him for that long, but knew he was alive simply because the litter box was still being used. He was rightfully a little apprehensive about the dogs, who were joyously curious and scared the hell out of him. Now that some time has passed the cat (who we have named Clembough, Clemmie for short as a nod to Groupon’s $1,000 baby-naming deal which may or may not have been a total publicity stunt) cautiously comes up from the basement, pausing at the top of the stairs and meowing loudly for a little attention, please. The dogs oblige immediately, which causes him to flee back down the stairs to his secret lair. The only time he is comfortable going as far as the kitchen is when he hops onto the kitchen table, which is more than a little bit gross.

Since he has taken up residence in the basement, we put his food and water down there. Unfortunately, the dogs can reach it. And since Ryder is afraid of his own water, he is delighted to be able to steal the cat’s non -threatening water.

Allow me to explain. Ryder is what you may call a scaredy-dog. I love Ryder. In fact, of all these animals, he is by far my #1 favorite. But he is also a purebred Golden Retriever and inbred enough to be a bit dumb. We found one of those continuous water dispensers at a yard sale for $3 and picked it up, thrilled that we didn’t drop $40 for the one I had been eyeing at Target. The dogs took to it just fine – until that horrifying moment when the 3 gallon water jug made a GLUG GLUG noise and traumatized Ryder for life. Now he refuses to drink from it, approaching it only when I stand beside him and stick my finger into the water, indicating that it is in fact NOT a giant monster poised to attack him. Since I don’t always stand there with my finger in the water, he tries to find alternate sources for thirst quenching. Every time I take him outside, he drinks rainwater from the lip of an overturned pond that’s waiting to be installed in the backyard. He noses his way into our showers every morning to lick the suds in the tub. And he steals the cat’s water from the tiny dish. The whole thing is maddening.

I know, I should just give him back his old (non-scary) watering dish and stop torturing the dog. But wouldn’t that just be pandering to his insecurity? Giving credit to inane neuroses? Ok, so he’s just a dog. But Bird has no problem with it, and it GLUG GLUGGED at him, too. I’m at a loss here. Poor scaredy dog.

 

amazing ammonia

You know when you are thinking about doing something but you keep putting it off and putting it off and then it just seems too momentous to bear? Sometimes that’s how I feel about blogging. I’m not really sure why – I love writing and I love sharing my writing. But for some reason I feel a sense of obligation to constantly update my blog, which makes the posts obligatory. And once they become obligatory, I don’t want to do them anymore. Of course, this guilt/anxiety is 100% self-inflicted. My new goal is to update when I feel like updating and stop feeling shitty about not updating. Hopefully then I will post more often than every three months.

What has happened since November? Not much. I do have a new obsession, and her name is Pinterest. Oh, Pinterest! I spent the entire weekend pinning, searching, admiring, swooning. Yes, I’m late to this bandwagon – but better late than never, of course. Actually, the slew of new ideas may be just what I need to keep me blogging. Maybe I’ll make brilliant crafts and post pics. Maybe the projects I find will go horribly awry and I can post about that. Either way, it provides something to talk about besides the dog.

Ryder is doing splendidly. He has a few behavioral issues that we need to get taken care of, but for the most part he is a good boy. His first birthday is coming up in March and I intend to have a full-fledged party with cake and balloons. And dog treats.

The point of this post isn’t to ramble on and on about how I’m going to write more. The point is to actually write something, which is why I am sharing my incredible story of oven burners, ammonia, and Google.

We moved into our house in June. It didn’t take long for us to realize that certain things had been left, shall we say, uncared for. The bathroom was unusable. The kitchen cabinets were filthy. There was a mouse living in the dishwasher.

We hired a professional cleaning service, and they did an impressive job transforming the house from practically uninhabitable to comfortable. They even revealed to us that our kitchen floor was really light tan, not brown as we had originally assumed. The one thing that they could not solve was the oven burner problem. The burners on the stove had so many layers of baked on, caked on grease and food spills that they suggested we buy new ones. The cleaners had spent a good amount of time and an entire package of Magic Erasers to get one burner semi-clean. It simply wasn’t worth the effort.

Unfortunately, these burners are $60 a pop, and there are four of them. So the past six months I have been trying to ignore my repulsive burners and hope that guests think they are black (they’re light gray). The other night, on a whim, I decided to use Google to figure out how to clean them. I think it was the Pinterest inspiration, actually. I discovered that all you had to do was put each burner into a Ziplock bag with 1/4 cup of ammonia, let it sit overnight, and scrub it off the next day. It seemed too good to be true, but ammonia is cheap. It was worth a shot.


The pictures don’t lie. Not only did it work like a charm, the grease that had “demolished 10 Magic Erasers” literally washed right off with hot water. It’s a little sad how excited I got over this cleaning mini-miracle. I had to use a scrubber sponge in the corners in order to get them perfect, but remember these things hadn’t been cleaned in approximately 50 years. I’m sure someone with a reasonably dirty stove wouldn’t have to use a sponge at all.

That’s it. That’s my story. Wasn’t it worth waiting 3 months for?

wordless wednesday

I know, it’s been too long! I wish I had some good excuse, something like “I’ve been busy working on my novel,” but the truth is that I’ve been busy catching up on recorded episodes of Auction Hunters. Anyway. I do have a whole post planned out and I’ve even arranged to blog on Nazareth Patch too (yay!)… I just haven’t been motivated. I spend all day writing and when I get home at night, sometimes the last thing I want to do is stare at a computer screen. But anyway, just so y’all don’t think I gave up on the blog, here are some pics for wordless Wednesday. Or in my case, not so wordless, but not as wordy as usual, Wednesday.

how to become a mother overnight

I swear, this blog isn’t just going to be about puppies. But the dog is new and the blog is new, so this is what I have.

It’s no secret that Eric and I want to have children, but haven’t been blessed with one yet. I guess that’s a very short and compact way of summing up a much more complicated reality. But anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I used to mock people who treated their dogs like children, talked to their dogs like children, and behaved as though their dogs actually were children. Now that I have a dog, I’m starting to understand why this is so easy to do.

It all started at Marshall’s when I was shopping for a dog bed and various other accessories. I started perusing the dog toy section and thinking, “Ooh, this one’s cute. Should I get the wittle bitty lambie or the wittle bitty lion? Oh my, but then there’s a giraffe, too!”

baby toy? dog toy? both..?

Yeah. It felt suspiciously like shopping for a small child, and the similarities were not lost on me. Plus, from the moment we brought him home to live with us, Eric automatically became daddy and I became mommy. Ryder’s new tag bears our last name. It’s like we effortlessly adopted a very furry child.

And like having a new baby, I feel desperately guilty every morning when I leave him and anxious to get home to see him. The romanticized notions are basically gone, and he gets in my way and annoys me daily – you know, like when you have a kid. I’m proud of what he has learned so far – you can already tell he’s getting more comfortable in his own skin and he’s even learning how to walk properly. Our little boy is growing up so quickly…

One non-baby related thing that makes me very happy about Ryder is that he has forced me into exercise. For the past year I have made up excuse after excuse to go back to bed for an hour after waking up at 7 to pack Eric’s lunch. Every night I would go to be saying, “Tomorrow will be the day. I will stay up and do my Pilates video or maybe even go for a run. I will not go back to sleep.” And then morning would come and the bed would look so inviting that I would abandon exercise in favor of sleep. But now that I have this very active pup, I’m guilt tripped into walks in the morning. Well, the first morning was a guilt trip. Now I actually enjoy these walks, probably as much as he does. I actually have more energy during the day, and I feel just slightly less guilty about crating him all day. Eric and I even started taking evening walks, too, rather than flopping down on the couch the minute we get home from work. So all in all, this dog has improved our lives and given us a pseudo-child.

Don’t get me wrong – we still want a real baby. But he’s a nice distraction in the meantime.