Meet Mee-Ree Asses...

So have been neglecting my blog lately.  Life has been pretty hectic.  The girls were really busy with their year end school activities, work, I signed on for another year as the assistant Troop Leader for Sara's Girl Scout troop, oh, and I have joined the board of the PTA as the secretary.  Couple all of that with the fact two out of our three children believe the concept of sleeping through the night is junk science and you have two completely exhausted parents.  So in talking with Chuck we thought, you know what's missing in this equation?  A dog!!  More specifically a puppy!  It's not like things could get worse...

We were kind of on track to get one early next year.  Remember that whole fiasco?  In a fit of desperation Chuck promised Sara a dog if she could go one year without crying.  She was about 117 days in when a situation presented itself.  Turns out it wasn't the dog for us, but now the girls were not going to back down.  Sara is oh so amenable to life lessons.  You really think she was going to let this go?  So a few days later we were at the shelter picking out a dog.  We were hoping to get one with a few years under its belt, I know it sounds awful when said out loud, but I really wasn't into the whole crate/potty training crap.  Oh, and we didn't want a big dog.  So long story short, we ended up with an 11 week old lab/retriever mix.  Her name is Mary Alice, she is a Southern Belle all the way from Georgia.  She had been dumped with her siblings in a ditch at a construction site.  The poor little bugga was all skin and bones until she was rescued.  She was nursed back to health and made her way to the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, MA.  A wonderful place to adopt a pet by the way.

Oh, and Emily, my almost 2 year old can not say Mary Alice.  She calls her Mee-Ree Asses.  I can NOT get enough of it.  If I ask her once a day, I ask her 100 times a day to say it.  I am a 12 year old boy at heart because I giggle every time she says Mee-Ree Asses!  Doesn't get old!

So leading up to the big day Sara and Anna were so excited!  They couldn't stop talking about it, counting down the hours until we were going to the shelter.  They were making plans on how they were going to divide the labor.  They were so on board and thought that we were the BEST. PARENTS. EVER!  We could have asked them to scrub the toilets with their toothbrushes....they were doing anything we asked of them.  They promised up and down they were going to take care of the dog.  Shockingly, that lasted about 3 days.  1.5 days longer than I had expected.  The one child to really take ownership of Miss Mary Alice is Emily, our 20 month old!  She is forever playing with her, taking her for walks and is a superstar when it comes to potty training the dog.  She will take her out, tell her, "A business" (we use the phrase 'do your business' to prompt her to use the bathroom) and she praises her, "a good girl doggie" when she does her business.  It is the cutest thing ever.    Emily is an awesome potty trainer for the dog, yet, she will walk around in a diaper filled with her own excrement for hours on end because she hates to be changed.  Every time we are out there I hear Alanis Morrisette singing in my head, "isn't it ironic, don't you think".  Fortunately Anna has come around and spends a lot of time patting and play with the puppy.  Poor thing was either being neglect by the older two or tormented by the baby.

Emily's  involvement doesn't end there, oh no my friends...she is gung-ho about training her.  Sadly, she is not very good at this.  I have been taking Mary to puppy training classes and she was doing great!  That is until Emily decided she was a full time dog trainer herself.  She has totally undone all our progress.  She will say, "MaryAlicesitgoodgirl"  all one word and hand her a treat at the same time.  There is no sitting being done.  She does this with "paw", "take it", "drop it", leave it" etc.  So now Mare just refuses to train with me because in her eyes I am the jerk that makes her earn her treats.  She just waits for Em to come in the room and cozies up to her.  Oh, and Emmie has taken to training our cat Lucy.  She will say, "MaryalicesitgoodgirlLucy".  The cat just stares up at her with utter contempt.

One day the dog was in the living room and really fussy and just walking in a tiny circle.  It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.  We have an electric fence, it is a wi-fi kind that you can set the perimeter.  We keep her fence collar on during the day so we can just let her in and out.  Well, turns out, Emily got her hands on the fence base and dialed in the perimeter so Mary Alice was confined to about a 3 foot circle in our living room.  Poor baby!!!  Now before someone calls PETA on us, we have industrial strength tape covering the dials so Emily has no access to it anymore.


I have to say we are so lucky, Mary Alice is a really good puppy.  It took her one night to be crate trained and she hasn't had an accident in the house after the 3rd day.  She sleeps all night without making a peep.  Truth be told she is way easier than the kids.  I am so in love with her already!  That being said, I will never be one of those people that lets their dog tongue kiss them.  In the span of no longer than 5 minutes I witnessed Mary licking her ass, eat some animal's poop she found outside.  I instantly puked after seeing that, she came right over and licked up my puke took off in the brush and came back with a freshly dead mouse.  There is NO WAY dogs mouths are cleaner than humans!!  I don't buy it for a second!! Oh and I will love with all my heart, but, if she ever comes around with a snake in her mouth the love dies right then and there!  The other day she was hanging around a snake hot bed (hot bed meaning I saw one snake there a few years ago) she turned around and had this long dark thing in her mouth...I was already formulating in my head what to tell the girls about why Mary Alice is no longer allowed in the house!  Thank God it was just a stick!! 

The thing I like the best about her is that Mary Alice loves me.  Really, she does.  She is so happy to see me, she follows me around and I swear she looks like she is smiling when she looks at me.  This is in sharp contrast to the attitudes I have been encountering around here lately.