 |
Inside, there was a fire smoldering in the fireplace. Darkness had fallen, and everyone else was in bed while I worked in the office doing whatever the hell it is I do in there all night long. Cozy was lying contentedly in the the adjacent Family room.
Or so I thought. (more…)
Looking back at my archive of photos and videos, before Meghan and Colleen most of the pictures were of the dogs. Starting in 2001, when we had two children to care for, very few of the memories recorded focused on the dogs. To anthropomorphize a bit, I’m tempted to think that this made the dogs sad, though I think they embraced their new roles in our growing family with typical Newfy aplomb. (more…)
3:00 a.m. Lauren woke up to go to the bathroom. Being very pregnant, this was not unusual, but this time she told me that she thought her water had broken, but she wasn’t really sure. When Meghan was born there was no question when the water broke as it was an event unto itself. Being tired and unsure Lauren went back to bed while thinking that she was having mild contractions. I went back to sleep thankful that nothing was expected of me except more sleep.
5:00 a.m. I got a nudge from Lauren asking, “Where is the stopwatch?” (more…)
Since Cozy was always around me, she often ended up in the same room as Meghan. On hot days, when Cozy’s tongue would be hanging out of the side of her mouth, Meghan would grab for it, but Cozy would usually slurp it back into her mouth to get it away from those grippy little fingers. Meghan was persistent though, and she really wanted to stand. If the tongue was out of reach, Meghan would try and grab a lip, or perhaps some loose skin around Cozy’s face. Whiskers were also in danger, but grabbing was one thing; it was the pulling that was a problem. (more…)
Cozy’s favorite pasttime was saving sticks thrown into the water. The ones that were lost were quickly forgotten like last year’s iPhone, causing me to wonder at the veracity of all those stories of Newfs saving people. (more…)
We had taken her to the vet’s office repeatedly and each time fed her the required antibiotics which fixed her right up. This time though, they did not seem to help. The vet suspected bladder stones, and needed to X-ray Cozy to be sure, so the vet and techs took Cozy from me and led her into the back room by her leash. I watched through the little window in the door where I could see Cozy looking back at me, panicked and afraid. She didn’t want to leave me so she struggled a bit with the vet, and by struggle I mean refused to move. The more she fought them, the more concerned I got, and the more I pressed my face up against the little glass window. (more…)
I also remember sitting on the couch with Lauren some time later reading an alphabet book to Meghan. We were the picture of family togetherness. Meghan would stare lovingly as I’d turn the page and read the words with happy Daddy abandon. (more…)
Thanks to our obsessive research regarding all things dog, we knew that cooked chicken is dangerous for dogs if it contains bones. While a raw chicken wouldn’t bother them, the bones get brittle when cooked and cooked chicken bones, when chewed by a dog, can splinter making shards that can cut them up internally. This was a situation that we calmly categorized as not good. (more…)
Young children are naturally very good at some things. Banging pots with a wooden spoon is one of them. Making poopy diapers is another, and let me tell you, when it came to this particular skill, the kid was a pro. Noticing that the pro had scored again, Lauren scooped Meghan up and headed inside to clean her up. The dogs evidently decided that they’d sniffed enough diapers for one day and remained contentedly in the sun. If a loaded diaper wasn’t reason enough to disrupt a snooze of this caliber, nothing was. Or so we thought. (more…)
An Internet mailing list allowed one person to send email to “the list” by sending to a single email address. The email address was a server which then resent the email to everyone that had subscribed to the list. Forums were still in their infancy, and blogs did not yet exist because this was the still the dark ages of the late 90’s when people used dial-up modems. Back then, email lists were still a pretty common means of information sharing for on-line communities. (more…)