Saturday, December 27, 2008

Puppy

We are .... insane (among many other things). In addition to two high energy children, two cats that seem to seek out ways to irritate me, and a dog who is mostly just wonderful, we are going to have a new puppy come sometime in late April. Another lab, probably black. Perhaps yellow. At the time we signed up for this, Charlotte was not quite as, uh, spirited (?) as she is now. She wasn't throwing noteworthy temper tantrums whenever Elisabeth so much as looked at a toy from across the room that Charlotte might, at some point in the future, think about playing with. She wasn't climbing up on top of absolutely everything. She wasn't running. She wasn't contemplating making the terrible twos the terrible 1.5s. But now she is doing all of these things, with expertise. So- we're crazy.

Elisabeth is excited. She has already named the new puppy. She chose to name her Elisabeth Virginia [insert our last name]. I guess that would make the puppy a "junior." She will go by "Ginny," as a nickname for Virginia. As Elisabeth said, "I like matching names. My name matches Aunt Elisabeth's and it works ok." She really wanted the dog to be called Elisabeth too - but I told her that would be too confusing. I said "What if I had to yell at the dog for doing something bad? Wouldn't you think I was yelling at you?" She replied, "No, mommy, I'd know it was the dog." And so I said "what if I holler 'Elisabeth!' - who would come? You or the dog?" and she said they'd both come - what is the problem with that? Admittedly she had an answer for every problem, but in the end she decided a nickname wasn't the world's worst idea. So luckily, we escaped having two Elisabeths in the same house. And now we'll just merely have chaos. And hopefully fewer toys, since the dog will inevitably eat at least a third of them.

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