DC Metro Moms

The Day My Dog Became A Dog

About a year and a half ago, a very sweet young couple moved into the house next door to ours. They were newlyweds, full of enthusiasm and excitement over the purchase of their first house. A few months later, they added an adorable yellow lab puppy - Bella - to the mix, to the delight of my twin girls (and the consternation of my aging basenji, Allie). Like many new dog owners, especially those without kids, Bella became the focus of their lives. They bought a station wagon, took him on nice long walks in the neighborhood, and generally turned into Dog People.

Until she got pregnant.

Last night, I noticed that their house was completely dark, and that only one car was out front. Knowing that the wife was due to be induced on Thursday, I figured that their baby was finally on its way. Turns out I was right - I saw the husband this morning as he returned from the hospital "to take a shower and let the dog out".

Ah, I remember that day - the day my dog took a significant drop down my priority list. I had gotten Allie back when I was single. At the time, she was the total focus of my life. She was my emotional support, the outlet for all my maternal urges, the one who made my apartment less lonely. Even after I got married, my dog was still an extremely high priority for me. Whenever we went out of town, I would spend much of the time worrying about her, wondering how she was and whether she was sad. When I got pregnant with twins, people would tell me that my feelings about her would change after the girls were born. "No way," I thought. "They don't understand - Allie is different. She's a dog, yes, but she's a very special dog, and will always be my first child." I was admitted briefly to the hospital with pre-term labor at week 34, and all I could think about was Allie and how sad and lost she would be when I didn't return home from the hospital that afternoon.

And then my daughters were born.

Someone took care of Allie for me when I was in the hospital having the girls, and I remember well the day when she was dropped back off. It was pure chaos in the house - one newborn at home, one still in the NICU - and when she got home, my first reaction was to be annoyed. (Annoyed!) I felt guilty inside, but in my exhaustion, I couldn't help being irritated that there was now yet another helpless creature that needed my attention. Fitting in her walks, her vet visits, and, frankly, her emotional needs, was definitely a challenge that first year.

Over time, Allie's position in the house has stabilized. She's not the alpha girl anymore. She's not always - or even usually - top of mind for me. And when we go away, I don't obsess anymore about whether she misses me. As a similarly dog-obsessed friend put it when she had her son Luca, "Oh, Peanut turned into a dog the day Luca was born."

I wanted to say something to my neighbor this morning about Bella, something that might assuage the guilt that I am sure he felt as he crossed the threshold of his house this morning after being up all night with his new son. Something that would let him know that it's ok for Bella to revert back into a dog.

Nah, he'll figure it out.

Original D.C. Metro Moms post. Photo courtesy of Clownfish.

Gayle blogs about books and reading at Everyday I Write The Book.

What To Wear On In Between Days?

I call these the "in between days". (Thanks to The Cure for the inspiration).

It's not summer anymore, even though today, it certainly feels like it. It's not winter yet, either. It's fall - that time of year when the mornings are chilly, the days are warm, and the nights are anything from balmy to cold.

These days wreak havoc on my ability to stay organized. Do I leave out the open-toed shoes, or pull down the boots from my shelf? I can't fit two seasons' worth of shoes on the floor of my closet. Sweaters - stick with the lightweight summer cottons, or yield to wool turtlenecks? RIght now the cool sweaters are hanging in my closet, while the winter ones sit folded upstairs in a cedar chest. It seems that I never have the right ones at my fingertips when I need them - what made sense in the morning is too hot by the afternoon.

When Are Kids Old Enough For Bad News?

Last night, my daughter picked a previously unread book from the bookshelf and added it to the pile of pre-bedtime reading. We've inherited a lot of books from her older cousins, and I pick up lots of kids books at used book sales, so I am not sure where this book came from. But it turned out to be a very moving book. It's called The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, by Modicai Gerstein, and it's about Philippe Petit, the daredevil who walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974.

"Is this a true story?", my daughter asked me, when we looked at drawings of Petit lying - yes, lying - on the tightrope, a quarter mile up from the ground. I told her that yes, it is a true story, that Petit is still alive, and that there was even a movie made about him last year. The drawings are breathtaking and powerfully convey the danger that Petit was in, as well as the feeling of exhilaration he must have felt as he performed on that tightrope while America held its breath.

Soon after my daughter asked me if the story was true, I turned to the second to last page, which simply said, "Now the towers are gone."

Living On A Smaller Scale

My family and I just returned from a two-week trip to France and Spain. While many questioned the sanity of bringing five-year old twins on a two-week trip out of the country, it actually ended up being an enjoyable trip. As long as we kept our expectations low and our agendas short, the days were comfortably full and no one got disappointed.

We spent most of our time in large cities, and while I was there, I was constantly stuck by one theme: Urban Europeans have a much more earth-friendly and much less consumerist lifestyle than most Americans I know. Here's what I observed:

• People simply buy less stuff. Food is a great example. Rather than stocking up on tons of perishable items at a time, they buy what they need for that night, or the next few nights. Most people travel on foot, so they buy what they can comfortably carry home.
•   
• Packaging is just smaller over there. I bought what seemed to be very small containers of juice, and surprisingly, those containers sustained my kids for a whole week. 
• Cars are smaller, and there are fewer of them. Most people take advantage of the excellent rapid transit infrastructure in the city.
• As my friend who had already been in France for a few weeks noted to me, "People definitely frown on you if you don't bring a shopping bag to the grocery store." Plastic bag consumption over there has to be a small fraction, per capita, of what it is here.
• Portions are smaller too. Restaurants don't overwhelm diners with massive plates full of food

• I noticed that while the streets are clean, the public trash cans are small. Europeans seem to generate much smaller amounts of trash. (See less stuff and smaller packaging, above.)

I Have A Mom Purse

As a working mom, I have to look relatively professional in the morning when I head off to work. Pants that aren't jeans or meant for a workout, a nice top of some sort, and shoes with heels. My briefcase may be a bit overstuffed and full of papers that I shuttle to and from work night after night without reading, but it's red and leather and looks OK.

Unfortunately, of late there has been a weak link in the work wardrobe: my purse.

When my twins were babies, I kept all the baby stuff in a diaper bag, separate from my purse. I never combined them the way many moms do, mostly because there were lots of times that I was out without the girls and needed a separate purse. And I liked it that way - my purse was sort of the last vestige of my child-free life and made me feel more like myself. But my girls are five now and I don't carry a diaper bag anymore, as they don't need sippy cups and diapers and wipes and little plastic containers of cheerios.

My Obsession With Archiving

Today, my twin girls turned 5. Five years have passed since that day that I first held their tiny bodies in the hospital and met the little people who had been kicking and moving around inside me for 36 weeks. And now, of course, they are sweet, adorable, usually well-behaved pre-schoolers with strong personalities and busy lives filled with school, activities, friends, and, of course, each other.

Last night, I realized that I have become somewhat obsessive in trying to capture every facet of their lives and preserve them into perpetuity. First, there is the sheer volume of photographs I have taken of my two girls. Thousands of them. And while I use a digital camera, of course, I still get most of those pictures printed and put them into photo albums. It has gotten to the point where it takes only three months of photos to fill a large album - that's a bit obsessive. I spent the last four nights staying up into the wee hours of the night to get caught up, and I am proud to say that I am current on albums through the middle of March. (It would have been the end of March, but I ran out of refill pages.)

Of Tooth Fairies, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny

Ever since Christmas last year, I've been facing a dilemma with my almost five-year old twins. It has to do with the existence - or lack thereof - of several beloved fictional characters in most American kids' lives. Characters like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

We're Jewish, so we don't celebrate Christmas or Easter. No tree, presents on December 25th, or Easter egg roll.  Our daughters go to a Jewish pre-school, so they are not really exposed to these traditions at school. But, of course, in December, Santa Claus is everywhere. And there were bunnies and eggs and candy all over the place yesterday. So we inevitably get questions like, "Who is Santa Claus? Is he real?"

Why Do I Blog, Anyway?

Like most of the contributors to this blog, I have a "mom blog". That blog is not my public blog - I have a second blog, about books, which I actively promote and which has my name and email address on it. But my mom blog - to which I contribute faithfully every day - is much more private. It doesn't have my last name on it, my daughters are referred to by their first initials only, and I don't use tags or categories or send the link to anyone other than close friends and family. On a good day, I get 25 hits (not counting people who follow it in a reader) - and that's fine with me.

I started the mom blog almost two years ago, when my daughters were three. There were so many cute and memorable things that happened every day - funny things they said, milestones they reached, sweet moments between them - and I knew that there was no way I'd ever remember them all. The rest of my life was already online, so it made sense to memorialize their lives in a blog too.

Working Through That Mommy Guilt

Today, one of my friends updated her Facebook status with this comment: "I hear that 'Cats In The Cradle' song in my head every time I tell one of the children that I can't play with them right now." 

Oooh - ouch! That one hits close to home. There are so many times when my daughters want me to engage with them - read them a book, help with a puzzle, draw with them - and I hear myself saying, "One minute while I finish this shopping list" or "Just a second, until I get this email done." or "Honey, let's do it later - I need to clean up and get us ready to go." I try to tell myself that whatever I'm doing can wait, that these moments with my girls are fleeting and must be treasured. And sometimes I do stop what I am doing and play with them instead. But I wish I could say that my track record was better.

A Weak Defense of February

I think T.S. Eliot had it wrong - February is the cruelest month.

I've never been a fan of February. Back in high school, the seniors published an insert to the newspaper at the end of the year entitled "Obsessions and Repulsions" where they could each list what they loved and hated. Under "Repulsions", my list started out something like this: "February, winter, cold, darkness, stress, grey, snow, ice, sleet, short days, etc...". In the intervening years, my feelings toward the year's second month haven't really improved.