I have been a wreck all day. My puppy – a 10 month old Labradoodle, possibly the cutest dog ever and certainly one of the gentlest – was attacked by a pit bull this morning. Let me reassure you that he is okay, albeit with a large puncture wound on his snout. This is what happened. I was taking him to the groomer’s this morning. I had him on his leash beside my van and I had just lifted my three-year-old son out of his car seat. Barkley was sitting beside me, not barking, not doing anything. A pit bull, on a leash, pulling his 90 pound owner, ran at him and attacked his face. The owner could not call him off. I had to kick the dog in the head several times before he would let go of Barkley.

Now that was traumatizing enough. But the thought of my three-year-old, standing right beside me, and the thought of what could have happened if that pit bull had attacked him instead of the dog…well, I guess you can imagine how I must feel.

I know any dog can attack if provoked. I know any dog is protective of its owner. But what about unprovoked attacks? I know that many people say it is not the breed, it is the owner. However, this owner really seemed…well, nice and very apologetic. Apparently this dog had never been aggressive before. Even if that is true, which it may be, that is exactly the point. If a dog has never been aggressive before, and then suddenly shows aggression, then I’m not sure the owner is to blame. It feels like that is something that is in the dog, which cannot be taken out.

Thoughts?

I’m going on a date tonight! I’m very excited; we do not go out for dinner very often and we never go out with the children. This is a fun fact that surprises some people – “you don’t take the kids to restaurants?”. Um, no. The thought of paying for meals that would most likely be left uneaten while I experience extreme tension from the perception that my children are being disruptive is not a happy thought. But anyway, dinner tonight! My parents, with one exception, always have given us a fancy restaurant gift certificate for our anniversary, babysitting included. The one exception was the year Jake was a baby. This story is embarrassing to my mother, but hey, it’s kind of funny. You see, Jake was what you might call an “evil baby”, and I say this with affection because he was an absolute joy as a toddler and now as a preschooler. But as a baby, he was colicky, and then when he was past the age for being colicky, he was just plain surly. He was the type of baby who would scream inconsolably if I say, left the room for thirty seconds. Half the time he would also scream inconsolably while I was holding him. (“Shouldn’t you pick him up or something?” my mother asked on the phone, over the din of the screaming. I was wearing him in the Baby Bjorn.) So, the year that he was a baby, instead of a dinner out we received two serving bowls for our anniversary! Lovely serving bowls they are indeed.

I had a friend who swore by weekly date nights. Every Saturday he and his wife would arrange for a sitter for their three children, and go for dinner and a movie. To me, the logistics for this scheme would be overwhelming, and usually I would rather hang out at home, with a nice glass of wine. But whatever works, right? Here is my personal recipe for a happy marriage:

1) Whether it is a regular date night, or just hanging out at home with a glass (or bottle) of wine, make time for just the two of you.
2) Cultivate your own interests, but if you find that you are always doing things apart, cultivate an interest together.
3) Statistically most fights are caused by finances and children. So, if you work through that, the rest will follow.
4) Listen to your spouse, and don’t take him (or her) for granted.

Simple, no? Although, I’m pretty sure if I asked my husband about his personal happy marriage recipe, it would sound something like this:

1) Keep wine rack full for crazy emotional wife.
2) Encourage daily yoga practice or wife becomes very cranky.
3) With a few exceptions, defer to wife for day-to-day decisions with the children, even when you know those decisions may not turn out well (example: “Sure, I think clay class sounds like a GREAT idea”.)
4) Do not watch golf when wife is talking about yoga.

Wow, it’s a joy to be married to me! What a lucky, lucky guy is my husband!

Anyone want to share their happy marriage hints?

A former boss of mine with a HILARIOUS sense of humour used to refer to my (and everyone else’s) in-laws as “the out-laws”. He also used to use the oft-used-at-that-time-in-business-circles phrase “open the kimono” which just gave me a mental image of him that makes me shudder just writing that. I actually had to stop typing for a minute to shudder. Anyway. The in-laws are visiting this week, which is fine: I get along with them just fine and they dote on the boys, who are their only grandchildren.

But despite the above, I always get a little anxious before their arrival getting things ready and it is ALL FOR NAUGHT. These people are incredibly laid-back about planning their visits. They don’t stay with us, they stay in a hotel, so they come over for a visit…whenever. They will go out to eat dinner by themselves or they will come over…whatever I want. This level of easy-going-ness is what makes me anxious.

You see, I come from a very large extended family who are (and I say this lovingly) a little crazy and very family-oriented, and there is always, always, some sort of feud going on between some members of the family. Someone is always not talking to someone else because of a real or imagined slight, or some kind of offense is taken, or someone doesn’t like someone’s spouse. You get the picture. Despite this, like I said the family is very clan-oriented and there are a few unspoken rules: a) if you visit, you stay at someone’s house, and b) you spend as much time as possible with the person you are visiting.

So you can see why my in-laws’ good intentions make me anxious. They like not staying with us, and truth be told, I like it too. They like eating some meals in restaurants, and hey, I don’t mind. But still, I have this constant feeling like I should be doing more, cooking more, making them at home in our (teeny tiny) spare room, just the way it was when I was growing up. This is why I think so many people have problems with their in-law relationship – it’s the melding of two different family structures and two different levels of expectation.

What do you think? Do you think most in-law issues could be solved just by accepting the fact that your spouse’s family does things differently?

“I need a spoon!” Jake said brightly this morning, retrieving a old plastic baby one from the drawer. “What do you need a spoon for, honey?” I asked. “It’s my dolly!” he replied. I smiled and continued on with the dishes.

A few minutes later, I looked up to see him, a toy monster truck in hand, driving over the spoon. “Take that, dolly!”

The past few days have been just lovely around here. Snow has been melting and the sun has been shining. “Spring has sprung!” was the ill-informed chorus on the street. I was walking the dog yesterday through a brisk, cold wind that was surely an indicator that the weather was changing. I spotted many joggers of that particular breed of Calgarian who disregard all thermometers and wind chill factors in favour of sunny and clear skies, and as a result are in shorts, their bare legs purple with the cold. And, sure enough, I woke up this morning to a foot of heavy wet snow. It’s still snowing.

MARCH IS NOT SPRING. At least, March in Calgary is not spring. Nearly every year, the poor misinformed spring bulbs will make their appearance in March only to be destroyed by heavy, wet snow. Sadly, this year has been too cold for those bulbs to pop up. But, spring is coming, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Today marks the end of the family clay class that I have been taking the boys to, every Thursday for the past nine weeks. I breathed a sigh of relief as we walked back to the van, clay turtles and volcanic islands in hand. You see, I hated clay class. I dreaded it every week. The boys, on the other hand, loved it, and so I kept my feelings to myself.

I was the only mom there with two children to deal with. I would look around and the other moms would be focusing their attention on their child and their clay sculpture, which would inevitably look like what it was supposed to look like. Suns would look like suns, complete with rays and smiling faces. Then I would look down at my little hyenas, one of whom would be adding a fifth eye to his sun, the other sculpting a sock to stick to his sun’s face. I would look at the other moms, painting and glazing with appropriate colours and detailing, and then I would look at my children, who had apparently ingested a hallucinogen of some sort, painting their sculptures in a strange and alarming array of colour. The entire class I would be crazily busy keeping up with them, helping them in their bizarre art, and not giving either of them very focused attention. On bad days, it sort of felt like a metaphor for my life.

I never for a moment have regretted having my children so close together. They are true playmates who share so many similar interests. However, I do feel that most days it is just impossible to give solid, focused attention on just one child at a time. I once read a parenting article that advocated spending thirty minutes per day giving one-on-one time to each child. I remember after reading that wondering how anyone could actually feasibly do that. Maybe by locking one child in his room for half an hour, so I could do a craft with the other? Hmm. That just doesn’t seem right.

Most days, I feel that the constant existence of a playmate in the form of a sibling more than compensates for the lack of one-on-one attention from me. And so even though the session is over, I will have many haphazard, colourful, crazy pieces of art to remind me of this time, when it was the three of us, together in our clay class.

In one week, Rob and I will have been married for seven years. For weeks I’ve been joking about getting the seven year itch. “Uh oh,” I’ll say, “I’m getting itchy!” and he will smile at me indulgently. That smile, that indulgence, is one of the many reasons I love him so much. He is indulgent and patient when it comes to me: my moods, my occasional crying jags, my wine consumption. He brings me Gerber daisies and listens to my stories, he buys me wine and rubs my back. He is a very good husband.

We have been parents for five out of the seven years that we have been married; in fact, our first child was born on our second anniversary (although I do not actually recommend the delivery room as a romantic anniversary destination). When Mark was a baby, and I would get together with my new mom’s group, conversations would always start out about nursing, and diapers, and our lack of sleep, and then they would morph into discussions about our husbands. “He was complaining about being TIRED,” someone would say, and we would all nod our heads in agreement, since moms have the market cornered on tiredness. “He went for a beer after work!” someone else would say and we would commiserate and talk about how we had to make dinner one-handed, with a baby on one hip. We were exhausted, hormone-deranged, overwhelmed with our new motherly responsibilities, and a little resentful that our husbands’ lives had not changed so entirely and absolutely, as ours had. Looking back, I can see that our husbands’ lives did change in just as substantial a way, even though they were still heading out to work in the morning instead of facing a day in the house with a newborn and a mountain of laundry.

Having a baby can put an enormous strain on a relationship, but it is also such a blessing. When I first met Rob, almost thirteen years ago, I would smile when I saw him, so ruggedly handsome in his CAT boots and jeans and fleece vest from Mountain Equipment Co-Op, with his longish hair on his forehead. Now he comes home from work, still ruggedly handsome, but in a suit and with much shorter, greyer hair. And I smile, and marvel at my fortune.