Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Dayzeeee!

Take a memo. Do not under any circumstances bring your young and impressionable daughter with you when you drop off the family dog for surgery at the vet's. One crying baby is enough.

Daisy, our beloved beagle, was shaking uncontrollably by the time we got in the car (she somehow knows when we are heading toward Doctor Doom). Sweetpea kept looking over at the trembling ball of fur up on hind legs next to her with annoyance because she didn't have a clue what was going on. "Dayzee!" she said, over and over. "Dit down!" Daisy would have none of it. She wanted one last look at the trees and the lovely blue sky and the flowers passing by before everything went black. Well that's the way you'd imagine it to be in her head the way she drooped her ears and gazed at me pleadingly for mercy. Truth is I can't actually look at her during these visits to the vet (usually routine) because it's too wrenching. And for those of you who think I'm a cold-hearted cousin of a warthog, stroking her gently and crooning reassurances only seems to make matters worse so I just let her be.

I guess I wasn't thinking because I should have dropped Daisy off without Sweetpea as an audience. Firstly she didn't particularly like the vet's - lots of doggies and kitty-cats that she wasn't allowed to touch ("Buster doesn't like kids"......"Kitty has mange and a snaggle-tooth infection so stay back, please.") and was no happier to be stuck on my lap than Daisy was cowering under the chair shaking so badly I thought she was going to have a heart attack. Bored to distraction, Sweetpea squirmed and whined until the vet came out from the back for Daisy...... and then all hell broke loose.

Daisy, seeing her end coming near, promptly peed all over the floor and the vet-tech (poor guy) had to pick her sopping little furry body up and slip-slide into the back where both Sweetpea and I could hear a lot of barking and scraping going on. Daisy let out a little yelp and then the door swung shut. At this moment Sweetpea suddenly realized that her beloved doggie had just been kidnapped by a strange man in a blue coat and started screaming at the top of her lungs....Dayzeee! Dayzeee! She turned to me with wild despair, her screams turning to sobbbing whimpers. I tried to reassure her, feeling like a total heel.

"Sweetie, Daisy is spending some time with friends and then she'll be coming home," I said soothingly. Sweetpea wheeled her head around and looked at me like I was crazy. "No, really, she's fine.." I went on, trying to ignore the little voice in my head shouting "Liar!!." We quickly left in a puddle of guilt and despair, so fast I forgot to leave her dog food, because she was staying for a couple of days afterward in the boarding kennel so we could go to Legoland for Sweetpea's birthday. I felt like the world's worst parent, to dog and child both.

Once in the car she continued to moan sadly. "Dayzee. Dayzee..." It came in little hiccups. Sometimes she would gaze out the window and call out her name, "Dayzeeeee, Dayzeeee," to which I would croon over and over the same lies, now getting more and more embellished. "Daisy is with her friends, honey." "Daisy is running and jumping in the hills with lots of other doggies and is having the time of her life. She's in sleep-away camp, swimming in a magical pond and eating lots of biscuits!" I felt so awful I almost went back in to retrieve the little hound. But I knew Daisy needed the surgery to fix an ingrown dew claw that constantly pricked her paw. What was done was done.

The moaning went on for some time, even after we got out of the car and I tried to distract her with a trip to the park, a ride on a pony, an ice-cream cone and seven clowns-a-dancing. She would lapse into silence for a while, and just as I thought she might have forgotten she would look over at me and quietly say her name....."Dayzee", then look away, lost in her sadness.
In the end I'm not sure who was more distraught over the whole thing, but finally the trip to Legoland managed to overcome the funk. For eight hours our family wheeled about in a theme park filled with about as many kiddie-distractions as are humanly possible and our Sweetpea did finally have a good time.

When we got home the next day I knew that I had to subject Sweetpea one more time to the vet experience. She had to complete the cycle, be part of the coming home of Daisy. We sat in the waiting room, once again squirming with impatience, and then the moment came, the door opened and out came our little beagle, looking no worse for the wear except a neat white bandage on her back leg.

Sweetpea flew off my lap and ran over to Daisy, who was understandably overjoyed and promptly tried to bowl her over with front paws and licking tongue. "Ow! Bag dawg!!!" Sweetpea shouted then promptly deserted her long-lost companion for a sucker offered by the staff.

As far as I know she didn't even give the recovering patient a sideways glance once we got home. All's well that ends well.

Friday, September 09, 2005

How I Spent....Oh, Never Mind

No-one told me that when you have a kid you lose your holiday privileges until they are in college. Gone, gone, gone, they are, as Yoda said to me in a dream.

Travelling is inevitable but it’s not like you are going to be visiting the pyramids or taking a summer home in Florence like people with nannies do. For us common folk, traveling with a toddler almost always means you are visiting family, which means the best you can do is maybe a visit to Niagara Falls if it’s down the road from Aunt Jessie. We have family spread out and none of them had met Sweetpea since we’d brought her home from China so we decided that this summer she just had to meet and spend quality time with all her aunts, uncles, grandmas & grandpas, cousins, second cousins and assorted hangers-on. Translated that meant four separate trips over an eight week period, two visits to Canada including a stint in Ontario’s northern cottage country, a five hour car ride to Central California, and one two-parter that started in Chicago and ended up in a Kansas tornado basement where Sweetpea slept to escape the heat. Add to this the joys of revisiting your own childhood angst (aren’t you the clumsy one!) while trying to put on a brave and mature face as someone’s parent yourself and you have a recipe for utter and total exhaustion. No holiday in my books.

Never mind the packing and unpacking (12 times but who’s counting), I numbed myself to it and by the end was tossing things into a giant duffle bag like I was going for a hoop shot. No, the truest and biggest mystery in family visits is why, when you have a scheduled stay in their home they steadfastly refuse to baby-proof it? It’s not like we dropped by for an quick afternoon visit….mind the crystal decanter sweetie on the bottom shelf of that bookcase, and oops, those are 25 steep stairs to the basement with a cement floor at the bottom so do be careful….I mean come on! How long can it take to sweep up the offending items up and put them away for a week or so and get a couple of baby-gates to protect the lives of the innocent? Here’s an idea, those pens that can scribble on the white sofa might be better up out of reach, and the six-pound granite coasters just made for dropping on Grandma’s toes should be stowed away for a bit. At home I don’t have to say ‘no’ very often because Sweetpea can cruise around our house in fair confidence she will return in one piece, but we encountered the flotsam and jetsom of people’s lives as a grim reminder of just how many ways one can be injured or killed in the blink of an eye.
Very relaxing for Mummy, I must say.

The best reaction I got when I complained about a porch in which the cross-braces had been removed providing ample space for a running toddler to take a header down a couple of floors to the ground was, gee, why didn’t I bring a harness? Hmmm, I should have thought of that. How fun for Sweetpea to be galloping around the house like a horse with Mummy on the other end of the reins. Has anyone seen how fast that kid can move??

As wonderful as the visit was for Sweetpea (who did lap up all the attention and open arms of her adoring family like she was to the manor born) I’ve taken a tally of the entire event and here it is by my reckoning:

The winner is.......
Hosts: Lots of baby hugs, photo ops, cute memories, and 0 personal items damaged due to Mummy’s ever-vigilant, wide-eyed, eagle stare and jump-up intervention with the running, pointing, grabbing, testing, tasting, exploring child of hers during all waking hours.

Runners Up:
Sweetpea: Ditto on the hugs, 5 nasty mosquito bites (one currently festering), 2 spider bites on the face while sleeping in said basements, two scraped knees, a shiner on the forehead, and sixteen assorted bandages reapplied liberally.
Daddy: Who came along for parts of the visits and got to play golf

Coming up the Rear and Limping Badly:
Mummy: 16 hours of total sleep over an 8 week period, a nervous eye tick, a suspiciously itchy scalp (please honey can you check for mites?), and a giant, bullseye spider bite (or maybe Rocky Mountian Spotted Fever) that won’t go away.

On the upside, I did get a fabulous list of recommended books from my aunt Liz and she has good taste. They are included here for your enjoyment since I have no time to read.

Happy summer vacation!

Aunt Liz’ Good Books List:

Balzac’s Little Chinese Seamstress
Belonging, by Isabel Huggan
The Pagan Christ, Recovering the Lost Light
Any mystery by Martha Grimes or M.C. Beaton