Take No Crap

My husband and I have been having a heated debate about the merits of getting a dog. We are not fast decision makers, so the debate has been both active and spirited for months now, and we seem no closer to a resolution. On one side is my husband. Let’s call that the pro-puppy side. He loathes the cats and hamster that currently reside with us and feels the time has come for a real pet, the kind that hops in the car with you, eager to join you no matter the destination. He has visions of a dog with a bandana around its neck, running along the hiking trail ahead of him or perhaps chasing a ball into the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on the other side. I don’t want to call it the anti-puppy side, because seriously, who is anti-puppy? I am more against the part where I am the one who will have to do the majority of the bad stuff that goes along with having a puppy. After all, I am not the one working outside of the home. I do most of the domestic responsibilities, and I try not to complain too much about it, certainly not any more than any other person would complain about his or her job. I just know that I don’t want to take on the brunt of the puppy maintenance.

When I look at a puppy, I look beyond the seemingly smiling face and floppy tails and too big paws, to what a puppy really is, a fur shedding energetic vehicle of destruction. Puppies don’t know how to shit and piss in the yard or while walking because they haven’t been trained yet, and someone is going to have to do the training, now, aren’t they? Even then, puppies, like young children, are going to have accidents, most likely on the Turkish rug. Who’s going to clean that up? Yep, the one who doesn’t work outside the home.

You know how babies put everything in their mouths? Puppies do it too, but they are even worse than babies because they are much more mobile. “The dog ate my homework” exists as an excuse because dogs actually eat homework. Some dogs even eat the home. I have a friend whose dog ate the couch when they went out for the day. A couch. Who eats a couch? After a couch is eaten, it will need to be digested and passed as fecal matter, most likely on the Turkish rug. Do you see the pattern here?

Then there are the vet appointments. The person who doesn’t work outside the home will have to schedule these visits and then take the puppy. What if the puppy gets car sick? What if the puppy who goes on to eat the couch has worms? Do you know what happens when a dog is dewormed? Those worms have to go somewhere, and generally it is two exits, not waiting. This will either happen in the car on the way home, or more likely, on the Turkish rug.

Or just maybe, the puppy won’t be able to go at all. Another one of my friends is the grandmother to an adorable yellow lab. Her daughter, who is off at college and thus is the best candidate to make a ten to twelve year commitment to another life, got the puppy. She picked it out because it was adorable, in the face. She neglected somehow to check it out from all angles, having fallen in love at first sight. She brought the pup home, and immediately it began getting sick all over the house.

My friend took her daughter and grand puppy to the vet’s office, where they discovered the terrible truth about their perfect little puppy. Upon examination, the vet discovered that the puppy didn’t have an asshole. Without being able to take a proper crap, the dog was getting sicker and sicker. I don’t know all the details about how this particular issue was resolved, but my understanding is that an anal orifice was somehow MacGyvered and the dog is now able to have a proper bowel movement. However, because of the tenuous nature of the aperture, a human must wipe the dog after every dump to ensure infection doesn’t develop. The puppy is growing normally and has a lot of love to give. It just can’t take care of its own asshole.

I relayed this story to my husband as part of my debate. He countered with my obsession with animal assholes. He’s right; I have a thing about dog buttholes. I don’t like to look at them. I prefer a breed with a low hanging tail, or at the least, a fur color similar to that of the asshole. Some dogs, like German Shepherds, have an upright tail and underneath, a sort of tan fur patch with a dark asshole in the center, a third eye if you will. I don’t want to look at that all the time. According to my husband, the first thing I would inspect on a new puppy is the butthole, making sure it met my strict pet asshole specifications, which means that I would never select an asshole-less puppy. I have to agree, he has a point about that.

Let’s go back to a moment to the two cats and the hamster. The hamster lives in a cage, where it also shits. I don’t have to go looking for a smell or clean a stain on the carpet. It chews, but I can throw a little twig in the bottom of the cage, so my shoes and furniture are safe. I can hold it, and when I am through, I can put it back in the cage with the shit and the sticks. The two cats were both kittens when we got them. Have you ever trained a kitten to use a litter box? It’s pretty easy. You put the kitten in the litter box. It hops out. You put it back in. It digs around a little, then it might pee or poop, and, if you are lucky, it will bury it under more litter. Repeat that a few times, like two or three, and presto, the kitten is litter trained.

 I just don’t believe that puppies are going to be that easy. Not only do you have to train them to poop when taking a walk, you have to train them to walk. And until that happens, if it ever does, there is going to be a whole lot of piss and shit in the house, probably on the Turkish rug. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially not the two who go to school or the one who goes to work in an office.

It’s not that I am anti-puppy.  I love puppies. It’s that I am anti-shit. I don’t want to pick it up, still warm, with my plastic bag covered hand. I don’t want to scour the yard for smelly landmines before my friend’s kids play back there. And I sure don’t want to spend the next year or so scrubbing stains out of the carpet (or the Turkish rug.) I have a feeling I will be spending more time doing that than I will romping on the beach or hiking on a mountain with man’s best friend. For now, I am perfectly content with the animals I already have. I am used to their style of waste management. I can tolerate it. I rarely have to inspect assholes or wipe them, and even more rarely do I find the occasional misplaced turd, which is downright tiny compared to the massive human sized dumps of the larger dog breeds.

So for now, the debate goes on, unresolved, until I get some sort of reassurance or, better yet, a written contract expressing the rest of the family members’ commitment to feces removal and general puppy maintenance. I do enough of the crap around here. I really don’t any more actual crap. Especially not on my Turkish rug.

From Scratch

My daughters and I started a new holiday tradition: baking cookies in our underwear.   Why, you might be wondering? The short answer to your question is that I don’t have three aprons. Let’s go for the long answer, though, because it’s more fun that way.

All week, my daughters wanted to make sugar cookies, the kind you roll out and decorate. As far as I am concerned, decorated holiday sugar cookies are the Walmart of the cookie world. They don’t taste good, and if you aren’t Martha Stewart, they don’t look all that good either. They are really more for kids, who are not yet in possession of a sophisticated palette and are naturally drawn to bright colors and fun shapes. They are my least favorite cookie to make or to eat. We only make them once a year if that, so for a few hours, I can suck it up and make my babies happy.

After spending a good fifty bucks on cookie cutters and decorating stuff and rolls of cookie dough, we got down to business. I decided to buy dough instead of making it because sugar cookies suck and I don’t care and it’s easier. I also had to buy some new cookie cutters because I got mad at my old ones taking up too much room in my drawer and tossed them in a fit of rage. And all the toppings, well, who knows how old those are. Does colored sugar go bad? I didn't want to find out. Back home, I got out the cookie trays, the parchment paper, the flour and the rolling pin. I preheated the ovens, and called the girls over to get started.

When I was little, I too loved to make sugar cookies. My mother never made a cookie in her life, but my grandmother would bake them with my sisters and me. She had an assortment of cookie cutters, a diamond, a heart, a bell, and for some strange reason, a camel. We would use colored sugar and red hots and silver nonpareil balls which looking back probably used mercury to give them their silver hue and shouldn’t have been eaten. We covered the dough in all sorts of nasty color combinations, and she smiled sweetly and let us do what we wanted. I don’t remember her ever really eating any of the cookies we thought were so special, even though the germs no doubt baked out of the finished product.

Sugar cookies were never high on my priority list as an adult, again because they suck, but also because they make such a colossal mess. Also, they remind me of play-doh, one of my most hated children’s toys. Play-doh smells funny and leaves tiny little pills of colored dough all over any surface in which it comes in contact. I spent many a day about ten years ago picking up tiny colored balls and vowing to throw away all of that non-toxic mess, only to give in the next time the girls asked  on a rainy day if they could play with the play-doh.

While it’s easy clean up sugar cookie dough, it isn’t all that easy to clean up rainbow sprinkles and colored sugar and chocolate jimmies, which resemble hamster turds to the untrained eye. For years, I have made sure we had plenty of other cookies around the holidays so that no one noticed that we forgot to make decorated sugar cookies. It didn’t work this year.

Now that my girls are older, baking sugar cookies was more fun because they added their own quirky touches. One of them meticulously decorated a snowflake cookie with individual sprinkles, while the other one insisted we used cat shaped cookie cutters so we could make kitties, which she then embellished with candy assholes. Let me tell you,  Santa wants nothing more than a crisp cat shaped cookie with a balloon knot.

Also, one of the girls found my husband’s Star Wars cookie cutters, which meant in addition to beautiful snowflakes and cat asses, we also had an assortment of Yodas and Boba Fetts and Darth Vaders, all tricked out in red and green. Yum yum!

The other big hit was the gingerbread boy, which my daughters fought to use. each time they cut one out, it was disfigured in some way, missing a limb here or there, whether to shark attack or birth defect, no one knew. My teen found it enormously amusing to line the torn edges where a cookie limb should be in red frosting, as if fresh from the battle field or zombie apocalypse.

So why the no shirts? Well, we had just come back from their piano recital and we didn’t want to get our clothes dirty. The kitchen is downstairs, the changes of clothing upstairs, and in between was a whole lot of laziness. It does get a little toasty near the double ovens, and when you are making asterisks on your cat cookies, any sense of decorum has already been lost. Where to go from there but shirtless?

Just a mom and her two girls, all in bras, licking fingertips and eating scraps of dough, fighting over who has to sweep the floor, and making memories.