As you may remember John and I bet when Cameron would arrive, because we thought it would definitely be before late October but couldn’t decide on when.  If it was before the 12th, John won. If it was after the 15th, I won.  If it was in between, it was neutral.  I went into labor on the 13th, he was born on the 14th.  He couldn’t have planned it any better.  This kid is trouble.  

I totally won.  After a disastrous class the week before, I gave birth one hour and twenty minutes before the final class began.  I personally feel that makes me the childbirth class winner as I gave birth right before the last class.  I was so good and paid such close attention I had my child!  This was debated somewhat, but I stand by my win.

Way better than we ever imagined.  Sam (dog) has adopted Cameron as his own.  He adores him and checks on him all the time to make sure he is o.k. Serena (dog) is missing being the center of every one’s attention but hasn’t put together that this is because of the new creature hanging around.  She does occasionally go over and sniff him, mostly I think because she sees Sam do it and he gets lots of love for doing it.  The cats are fairly indifferent.  None of them are in love with Cameron, but none have tried to harm him in any way either, so that’s success in our book.  Well, my book.  Success in John’s book is if they were all horrible and he got to send them away.  

If there are any other burning questions out there, feel free to ask!

We can check something off our list of a million things we still need to do. 

It is a small practice, and family run, which is wonderful because already everyone knows us and I don’t feel like one more person with my baby in the hubub of everyone else.  The paperwork is simple, everyone from the front desk to the techs to the doctor are wonderful and kind and warm. 

The doctor is great.  He is not overly cuddly and fluffy.  He isn’t going to get down there and snuggle and hug anything, but he is warm and kind and to the point.  There is not going to be sugarcoating or dumbing down of language, he is going to let me know what’s going on and what different options will be if needed.  However, with that being said, he is not going to put pressure on me.  I feel like he will do his best to lay out a variety of choices, and let us choose, without judging that choice and making me feel like I picked the wrong one.

Something else that in the back of my head I knew was always important to me, but hadn’t really articulated in the front of my head, was having a doctor who is intellectually curious.  By this I mean someone who I know is up to date on the latest in medicine.  Who not only subscribes to journals, but actually reads them, and guides his practice based on the latest research.  Evidenced Based Practice. Shoved down my throat in nursing school to the point of never wanting to see those three words again, but I must say it is a fairly important thing to me.  

He may not be rumply, but he is kind and warm, knowledgeable without making me feel like an ass if I choose option “a” over option “b”, is current on the latest medications, and my animals don’t seem to mind him at all.

Fine.  So I have picked a vet.  But this was super important and something I’ve been trying to do for over a year.  This was high-up on my priority list of things that really needed to be done.  I realize we are going to have to be way faster on the pediatrician thing as I don’t have a year+ to choose, but I think it was a good first step for me.  I figure things age faster in animal years anyway so a year of vet searching must be equivalent to a month of pediatrician searching.   

And I figure worst case scenario, maybe my vet will accept kids. They’re pretty similar in the beginning anyway.

I believe I mentioned a little while ago that Sam had taken up hunting opossums in the middle of the night.  A habit every dog parent would be proud of.  He started this months ago.  We woke up to Sam barking his head off, opened the door to let him out and within 10 seconds?  he had returned with a giant opossum in his mouth.  He was so proud because he had killed the opossum and brought it to us.  But it was an opossum so it was just playing dead and Sam had no clue.  We told him what a smart, brave dog he was and then brought him inside allowing the stupid opossum to awake from the dead and scuttle off somewhere.  

The last couple of weeks he has twice more done this, but we think it is the offspring of the original opossum as the first one was quite large and this one was more medium size.  It is always in the middle of the night when Sam does this and we are always too foggy to think that’s what he’s after so we let him out just in time to fully wake up and realize what we’ve done.  A couple of times in the last week we have been quicker to react and when he starts going crazy at night we tell him to shut up and go to bed.  And because he has brains in his skull, opposed to the sweet, fluffy, cotton candy in Serena’s, he knows what that means and goes to bed.  

Our hope is that if he were barking at an intruder he wouldn’t be  quite so quick to go back to bed. 

Today, I arrive home from work and let the dogs out. They were out in the morning, but I came home and let them in at lunch because it was 100,080 degrees today.  Maybe only 99,070. Thermometers are only so accurate.  Serena wanted no part of going out because it was FAR too hot for a dog. Hello?  Had I not been outside?  Sam went bounding out to pee on stuff.  

Then he started barking.  Eventually the curiosity of what Sam was barking at got Serena so she too wanted out.  She went out and started barking, having no idea what she was barking at. Par for the course.  I gave them water and then went to the car to go pick John up from work. As I lay my hand on the gate though, I look and Sam is standing at the side of our garage barking behind it.  Not going behind it, but barking behind it.  Decidedly NOT going behind it.  I figured this did not bode well.  Especially when Serena trotted over to the garage, looked around the corner and quickly trotted back to me as if she had seen nothing. Absolutely nothing.  Let’s go inside.  

Getting irritated at being out in the heat WAY too long and knowing I’m late picking up  John, I whip around the garage expecting the stupid opossum to be lumbering around.  Not quite.  Try, Large, Angry Vulture instead.  Oh yeah.  There was a massive vulture literally staring me in the eyes.  I, like Serena, quickly ran back around the garage.  There were many questions going through my head, probably the biggest being, um…why is there a giant vulture in my yard? That was not scared of my dog in the slightest?  After much debate of trying to figure out what to do I start walking over to the vulture.  It kind of ruffles and then flies up to the branch of a tree directly above where it had been sitting on the ground.  Sam then runs over to the spot where it had been and a swarm, a thick cloud really, of flies rises.  And then the smell hits me. And then I go inside.  Get the leashes at John’s suggestion, get the seat belts as Sam has no interest in the leash, and both dogs run over to the gate for a car ride.  We all three go pick John up and come home. The vulture of course is back in the yard but this time when it sees me it flies away. 

John investigates and indeed, Sam has finally killed, truly killed, the medium opossum.  And the vulture kindly eviscerated it.  As John and I discuss the afternoon I tell him  I can’t figure out what made it fly off. Why did it leave when I showed up, but not when a rabid, snarling, growling, barking dog was charging it?  

John’s response?  Well, the dog’s smaller than you. You’re pretty big.  I know he meant this in a purely humans are bigger than dog way, not in a you are pregnant way, but standing there dripping in sweat, hot, tired, and cranky, I took it as a you are  pregnant way.  Before I got angry though, I thought about it and decided maybe that’s not so bad.  It is like a pregnancy super power.  Something you can put on your pregnancy resume: Scares Vultures With a Single Glance. 

everything. He is waiting at the door everyday when I get home and follows me around until I pick him up.  He never uses his claws on me, and almost never on John.  He sleeps with me every night, now down by my feet but before I was pregnant and thrashing at night he would sleep on my stomach or legs.  There is no way to truly express his pure and utter devotion and attachment to me.

We also have special dog seat belts we use to buckle our dogs into the car when we travel, something that we are made fun of on a regular basis by pretty much everyone.  But the dogs LOVE it.  Seriously.  Well, Sam loves it. Serena honestly wouldn’t know if we super glued her to the seat.  But Sam used to be kind of a nervous traveller.  He didn’t mind it, but he was never settled.  We started using a seat belt and he thinks car rides are the most exciting thing we have to offer.  Well, that and wildlife in our backyard that he can kill.  But car rides are a close second.  

The seating arrangement in the car for these trips is Driver, Sam in front passenger seat (I know, his head will be obliterated by the airbag in case of an accident but it is a chance we take), Serena in the backseat behind the driver, and remaining human companion in the back behind Sam.  This was something I did not lobby for, but when John takes him out to run errands, he always put him in the front seat.  Because to him, Sam is The Great Weekend Errand Buddy that I am not.  He therefore deserves the highest place of honor in the car, the front passenger’s seat.  I learned this the first time we went on a long car trip after moving here and when I went to put Sam in the car he went right over to the front passenger’s seat, hopped up and settled in.  When I exclaimed that I was actually part owner of the vehicle and didn’t actually remember him putting money towards the purchase and his place was in the back seat, I was rebuked.  By my husband.  Who apparently had forgotten to forward me the memo on the seating arrangements.  Particularly where The Great Weekend Errand Buddy was concerned.  

On the way back from that trip I did put my foot down and demand Sam sit in the back.  It was one of the most miserable car trips we’ve had.  Often I couldn’t tell whether Sam or John was whining louder.  

The Backseat Human gets the honor of sitting with Serena for a number of hours.  Even though she is buckled, the sedative actually liquefies all bones in her body and she therefore oozes over the ENTIRE back seat from door to door.  As you need bones to jump up into a car she requires complete assistance for that task as well.  Our rest stops are the most awkward you’ve ever seen.  

Due to Serena’s oozing, Backseat Human ends up with the front half of Serena’s body in his or her lap.  Generally this entails a good amount of drool and eye goop as the sedative also seems to produce large quantities of both.  

Yesterday, I was in the backseat covered with Serena.  John put on some music.  Bogey started dancing.  Serena popped her head up, looked at me, let out a world class sigh to let us and the state of TN know she was displeased, and then put her head back down.  She did this a couple more times before I realized the problem.  Bogey was kicking her in the head.  And she couldn’t figure it out.  Instead of moving her head, she just looked at me disgruntledly trying to figure out why she was being poked in the head.  Repeatedly.  By something she couldn’t ever find. And why wouldn’t I make it stop.  Because it might kill her.  Right there, in the car.  

At that moment I wished there was some way for me to communicate to her the incredible change she’s about to have in her life and the fact that right now, her nuisance was contained in my belly.  And that he wasn’t intentionally doing it.  Wasn’t even aware of what he was doing. That in a year’s time this nuisance will be sitting there purposefully kicking her in the head. While she is SHARING the backseat.  

We’re currently looking into the safety of traveling while in a pod on top of the car.  No word yet as to who would get that luxury.   

In order not to completely turn everyone off from reading this blog I won’t introduce them all at once .  I am going to introduce them individually over time.  Starting with Serena.  

Five years ago, right before we got married, we adopted Serena from the Humane Society.  The story they sold us:  Serena  is a lovely, 8wk old puppy, healthy and happy and ready to go home. She is mostly spaniel so will not get to be more than about 20-25lbs.  The real story:  Serena turned out to be 5-6 weeks old, weaned too soon from her mom (who was at the shelter so there was no reason for her to be weaned) FULL of worms, and had some kind of raging skin infection.  She grew up to be 55lbs with pretty much no spaniel in her at all, mostly lab, some sort of herding dog with lots of energy, and something with a high pain tolerance and low brain power.  

We love her dearly, but she is a big dog that thinks she is a cat/human/anything but a dog.  She won’t go near a toy in the yard if it is near dog poop.  In fact she will do a little tip toe dance and come running back to us as if to say, “omigosh.  There is POOP.  IN.  THE.  YARD. GROSSSSSS.”  She will hold in her pee for hours when faced with a rainy day and actually will not touch the grass when peeing on said rainy days when we finally force her outside.  I know. We’re abusive.  

Bogey Bottom Line:  Serena is the one most likely to be confused as to whether Bogey is a toy, a small cat, a squirrel, or maybe a rawhide?  As long as she is still allowed on our bed, gets fed her normal amount of food, and gets to chew rawhides at least a few times a week I think she’ll be o.k. She may even synchronize her whining with Bogey’s.