Life Lessons

As I have journeyed through life, I have learned many things. Don't pee uphill. Don't chase a cat when you're on a leash. Eat whenever you get the opportunity. Generally, I think knowledge is a good thing. The more lessons I can learn, the better off I am. However, sometimes I learn lessons that I would rather not have learned because the price of learning is just too high (like when I learned I shouldn't jump off the bed to run outside and chase a possum the night after I had surgery on my reproductive organs). These lessons I would have been happy to live a lifetime without learning, but unfortunately that was not to be. Just yesterday the Alphas had a day full of those kinds of lessons.

Around 5:50 a.m., Alpha Female learned that if you pull apart a band-aid wrapper in the dark, the adhesive lights up as it separates. This lesson was confirmed at 5:51, 5:52, 5:54, and twice at 5:57. She also learned that if you pull the wrapper apart really quickly, the adhesive will glow for a little while. Nobody was hurt, there was no blood, but Thing 1 insisted she needed band-aids up and down her arms and one more across her nose. Alpha Female doesn't like getting up before the sun and would rather have been sleeping and never learned this interesting band-aid packaging fact.

Later that afternoon the Alphas learned that Thing 1 will actually eat chocolate and oranges until somebody forces her to stop. It seems it is physically impossible for her to get full if all she eats is chocolate and oranges. This didn't seem like such a hard lesson to learn when they initially learned it, but it occurred to them on the car ride home, pulled over on the side of the expressway, in the dark while cleaning chocolaty orange throw up off of Thing 1, Thing 1's carseat, and all the new Christmas presents that had been riding at Thing 1's feet that the chocolate-orange phenomena was a lesson they would have preferred to skip.

The Best Present Ever

After getting an extra hour of sleep, a casserole dish, and a golf shirt from Thing 1 yesterday the Alphas thought that they could never get a better present from her. Boy were they wrong. Today she topped it all by going pee pee in the potty! It is a very exciting day around here.

And guess what! I was just about to post this and she did it again! I am so proud.

Merry Christmas

What a magical Christmas. The Things started out right by giving the Alphas the best Christmas present of all, an extra hour of sleep! I got lots of food (even a present from a cat, thanks, Splinky!) and Thing 1 got everything she asked Santa for, candy. He came by on a firetruck on Christmas Eve to deliver it. It would have been a perfect Christmas if I had been able to keep down all the food I ate. Oh well, it tasted just as good the second time. I hope your Christmas was just as special.

Sign of a Rough Week

When the end of the week rolls around and you have enough clothes soiled with throw up and poop to comprise an entire load of laundry, that's a sure sign that it has been a rough week. Not only because that stuff got on the clothes in the first place, but also because those clothes were allowed to accumulated instead of being washed right away. Gross! That was the kind of house I was living in last week.

One day, Alpha Female picked Thing 2 up from school and was sent home with a bag full of poo contaminated clothes due to a phenomena known as "diaper blowout." Alpha Female didn't feel up to dealing with it when she got home, so she threw the bag in the laundry room. When Alpha Female came to pick Thing 2 up the next day, she was greeted with a story about how the teacher thought that Thing 2 had knocked over a bucket of toys, but upon closer inspection no spilled toys were found and the noise was found to have come from another source. Again, Thing 2 came home with her clothes in a plastic bag and Alpha Female now had two bags of contaminated clothes waiting for her in the laundry room. The next day, Alpha Female got a call from Thing 1's school. Thing 1 had thrown up all over the place. Not a lot of detail was given, but sometimes that is the most effective way to make a point. Apparently this incident was precisely the sort of incident for which the term "projectile vomiting" was coined. At the end of the day, Alpha Female added a third plastic bag of clothes to her collection (this bag even included the socks and hair things that Thing 1 had been wearing). Then, on Friday, Thing 1 was in a Christmas play. At the after party, Thing 2 must have had a little too much to drink or something because now it was her turn to throw up all over Thing 1's school. Luckily Alpha Male was holding Thing 2, along with a plate of food, when this happened. The plate of food caught most of the mess and Alpha Male's clothes caught the rest. Fortunately, he was not stripped down and sent home with a plastic bag full of contaminated clothes, he was allowed to wear his contamination home like a badge of parenting honor. These clothes went in the washing machine to await cleaning. So when Thing 1 woke up Saturday morning covered in throw up, it was easy to just throw her clothes and sheets in the washing machine with Alpha Male's pukey clothes, empty the three other bags of clothes that had been waiting all week into the washing machine, and start a toxic waste load of laundry.
Fortunately, I never got the bug. I did try to help clean up Thing 1's mess the only way I know how but the Alphas made me stop licking it off the floor. I was just trying to help. I am happy to report that everybody is feeling better now and there is very little dirty laundry in the house, and no toxic laundry waiting in the laundry room.

Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before

Because I've been absent from blogging for so long, I feel like I have to make a great comeback. So I've been waiting for a great post topic which I can use to make my comeback. Thankfully, the Alphas cooperated and I have big news to share. It took me a while to figure out what was going on around here, though.

I generally think of myself as a very intelligent schnauzer, I may have mentioned that before. However, there is one area of human development which I just don't seem to get. I think it may be because of a certain operation that the Alphas decided would be in my best interest. Anyway, for whatever reason, I seem to be a little dense about certain human activities. I will tell you this story as I saw it develop, but feel free to stop reading as soon as you figure out what is going on.

Back in October, Alpha Female wasn't feeling very well. She didn't want to eat much. Naturally, I figured that she had some worms. There's nothing like worms in your digestive track to make you want to stop eating. However, even though she wasn't eating, she wasn't losing weight and getting washboard abs like mine. In fact, just the opposite. The longer she went without eating, the rounder her belly seemed to get. And then Alpha Male started asking her is she felt OK. He would ask a lot. Then, I started to think that the lack of food was making her hallucinate because she would tell Thing 1 not to kick the baby when Thing 2 wasn't anywhere around and Thing 1 was just kicking Alpha Female's belly. By this time, I was starting to wonder if something very weird was happening again. Then Alpha Female told Alpha Male that Thing 1 needed to get potty trained because Alpha Female "wasn't going to have three of them in diapers at the same time." That really alarmed me. Had Alpha Male started wearing diapers? Or had I experienced urinary incontinence without realizing it? Finally, Alpha Female showed me this picture and I figured it all out.


We're getting a new Thing!!! I am expecting to be able to lick up more spit up milk around June 9. And it's about time, too. Thing 2 is getting very stingy with the Cheerios recently.

Flea Dip

Guess who needs a new flea and tick collar? That's right, it's Alpha Female. You didn't think it was me, did you? Alpha Female had to ask Alpha Male to pull a tick off of her belly with tweezers. Now she knows what it feels like. You'd think it would generate some sympathy for how hard my life is, but that's not really the way it worked out. Alpha Female suffered a tick infestation and I was the one who got stinky, sticky medicine rubbed into my fur. How is that fair?
And Alpha Female isn't the only human in the house who is experiencing dog like symptoms. This weekend, Alpha Female and Thing 1 were hanging out on the sofa watching Sesame Street. Thing 1 climbed of the sofa and said, "Daddy coming home." Alpha Female always thinks she knows what's going on and she said, "No, Daddy's not home." But Thing 1 stuck to her guns and just repeated, with enthusiasm, "Daddy coming home!" As Alpha Female attempted to correct Thing 1 again, she looked out the window and saw Alpha Male's truck pull up to the driveway. How did Thing 1 know he was coming? Alpha Female asked her, but Thing 1 won't give away her secrets. Of course, I know how she knew. She must have super-sensitive doggie hearing and have been able to hear his truck from about a half mile away, or she could have super-sensitive doggie smelling and have been able to smell his truck from about a half mile away. My advanced doggie senses told me he was coming when he was still a whole mile away.

Endless Loop

If you haven't had a rodent themed song running through your head for the past couple of days you either didn't spend enough time on the links in my last post or you have some kind of a super power. And because the links where hard to stay away from, I'm guessing it's a super power and I am jealous. I would love to not get song fragments stuck in my head, repeating day and night.
I think Thing 1 is starting to suffer from song fragment repetition, too. Last weekend Alpha Female and Thing 1 were coming out of the grocery store and Thing 1 starting singing "E-I-E-I-O, quack, quack, here, quack, quack, here, E-I-E-I-O, DOG!, woof, woof,..." She may not have had the words exactly right, but I bet that just makes it more annoying, because then you are trying to get the song out of your head while at the same time trying to remember the words to the song. That could create a downward spiral to drive a person crazy! It's probably even worse for her when she gets the alphabet song stuck in her head. When she sings that song, she gets the whole tune right, but mumbles her way through all but about 10 letters. It goes like this, "A, B, C, blah, la, la, la, G, la, I, blah, la, la, M, na, na, P, la, blah, na, T, U, la, blahblahbla, la, na, Z!, now I know my A,B,C, next time, blah blah na with la"