Do you think Oprah will mind if I rub her cheek?

Wednesday, April 15, 2009
It looks like it would be really soft. I'm sure she wouldn't mind, right? I'll let you know on Monday if my suspicions are confirmed or not.

Chicago - here we come. Watch. Out. 6 married women in a minivan, newly-purchased undergarments in tow. Yahoo!

Oops. He did it again.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009
I was so proud of myself. I was ahead of the game, for once, and had already purchased goodies for the girls’ Easter baskets, along with candy to fill the plastic eggs to be hidden at my mom’s this weekend. And, I was feeling particularly clever having purchased super cute little pink and purple tote-type bags for their baskets, which can actually be used for something following Easter morning, instead of merely contributing to the clutter in my already cluttered basement. Granted, the totes will probably be used by my daughters to carry around their OWN, well, clutter, but I digress.

So last night we arrive home in our usual car-full-of-circus-clowns style, and I high-tail it upstairs to change into workout clothes. And what do I find but a gigantic puddle of dog vomit on our bedroom floor. If you’ve ever seen our bedroom, you may be wondering how exactly I’d ever be able to distinguish between the carpet and a pile of dog vomit, and you’d actually be pondering a very valid question. Again, I digress. But there was vomit. And I was just a bit peeved that I was now going to have to postpone my planned workout in order to, somehow, remove the vomit from the vomit-colored carpet. Don’t get me wrong, I was concerned about why the dog had thrown up such copious amounts of vomit, but at this point, newly-discovered, I was more pissed than concerned.

I cleaned it up. And cast angry glares in Brewster’s general direction.

And we proceeded with our evening ritual: the girls made messes while simultaneously begging for milk, a movie, a board game and a snack, Pat started supper, and I followed the girls around in a half-hearted attempt to get them to clean up their messes and fulfill their every wish. Okay – maybe I turned on the computer and browsed the internet for a while, too, but that’s not what this is all about, so don’t get all judge-y. Something needed my attention in the basement, and that’s when the giant mess on the rec room floor grabbed my attention. For a moment, I couldn’t recognize what the mess was. Then, in a flash, it all came to me. Easter basket goodies, totes, AND EMPTY CANDY BAGS. Torn and strewn about, with NO trace of candy remaining. Shitballs. Okay – maybe it’s not a word, Word, with your fancy little red underline – but it sure as heck should be. I had put the goodies ON a shelf IN a closet IN the basement. (Whoa – that sentence was highly reminiscent of one of the girls’ fav books of the moment, “Go Dog Go.” Three dogs, in a house, on a boat, in the water!)

I can only assume that the bag fell OFF the shelf, IN the closet, IN the basement, and the dog, being the pain in the ass that he is, since he’s a DOG, smelled the candy, and wrangled the sliding closet doors opens to get to it. And then had a sugar feast, and licked the bags clean, then, deciding that wasn’t enough, proceeded to tear one of Jo’s gifts to shreds. My pissed-offedness dramatically skyrocketed at this point, but only for a moment until I remembered that one of the bags of candy, that was entirely gone, was M&Ms. Dogs and chocolate - hmm. Now insert concern. And frantic internet searches for “dogs and chocolate.” Of course, I knew this to be a dangerous combo… but we’ve had Brewster for 6 years, and this dog has eaten, well, A LOT OF STUFF, and I didn’t truly know how much chocolate was enough for REAL concern. I figured an entire bag of M&Ms probably warranted sufficient concern. The sites I was finding highlighted vomiting, diarrhea, frequent excessive thirst and urination, restlessness, hyperactivity (have they met our dog, seriously, how am I supposed to distinguish this as anything but normal?) as possible signs of danger – and all this before the muscle convulsions and coma set in, followed by death.

So now I had to convince Pat that this situation warranted some sort of action on his part, and he put a call in to my old hometown vet, who, by being leaps and bounds cheaper than vets here in the Cities, has now become our vet. And when you have a dog that has a chronic ear infection issue, and likes to consume paper products which block the digestive tract and result in $175 vet consultation fees only for the aforementioned dog to throw up the paper plate he earlier consumed without our knowledge, the issue of money becomes a very important one. (By the way… how frickin’ ridiculous is it that a “poison control” hotline exists for animals, but you get charged $50 for a consultation?? Ri-dicu-lous.) The vet advised us (via FREE phone calls) that it was a good thing he (the dog, not the vet) had already thrown up, and to feed him (the dog, not the vet) some milk and bread to further aide in absorption of the bad stuff into his blood stream (called theobromine, in case you were wondering.) Then, we needed to administer (via an empty beer bottle – which we just happened to have! - to help make sure it got down his throat) some hydrogen peroxide to induce further vomiting.

AND, this is the fun part, folks, it is sometimes necessary to massage the dog’s stomach or perform something similar to the Heimlich maneuver on the dog to help encourage the vomiting. Well, I tell you what, I had already cleaned up dog goo, and decided Pat was going to be the one all over this vomit-inducing/Heimlich-maneuvering procedure. And, let’s just say, if you happened to have a vantage point of our backyard last night, you probably caught quite a show.

So, another disaster averted, and all seems to be well. And really, he is a very sweet dog – despite all my bitching and complaining. Perhaps I’d rather do without some of the vomiting and paper-plate-consuming and Desitin-eating and slipper-chewing and what have you, but, he’s one of us, for better or worse.

Oh – and the rest of us are doing just fine, too. :)