Puppy

Remember that sweet little puppy I introduced to you in my last post?  Remember how sweet and innocence she is.  She is.  But she is still a puppy.  She is doing the normal puppy things like chewing the boys' toys, ripping through a flip flop of mine, having accidents in the house.  All fine and expected.

But currently, I am sitting in my office, not my home office, but the office office that I don't have to go to often.  I am sitting here waiting for Travis to go to the house, get the truck keys, come to the office, and unlock the truck.  Why am I waiting for this you wonder?  Oh, that would be because sweet little puppy Lulu LOCKED ME OUT OF MY TRUCK.

I brought her with me to the office, because what dog doesn't like a car ride and she is new enough to the house that I am not so sure about alone time for her.  When we got to the office, I left my keys and phone in the truck because I was parked in front of the big ol' open overhead garage door and was just running in to grab three boxes.  Less than two minutes.  I got my stuff done, headed back over to the truck, and I hear, "CLUNK."  That was the clunk of the doors locking.  With my keys, phone, and dog inside.  I looked up and saw her propped up on my door handle, with her little head tilted, looking at me all, "Oh hey hi!"

Since none of us are at the office very often, there is no office phone.  While weighing my options, I stood there like an idiot for a couple minutes, talking to the dog through the closed window, trying to get her to put her paws back on the door handle and magically hit the unlock button.  Shockingly, that didn't work.  So, I headed to our neighboring offices to ask to use someone's phone.  Fun fact about our office space:  it's part of a handful of office condo type spaces, each one with it's one entrance, and very few people are actually in them frequently.  Nobody was there.  Then, I headed down the street to the city utility company to admit to a bunch of strangers that I let myself get locked out of my vehicle by a 13-1/2 week old puppy, and ask if I could use a phone.  They were very nicely laughing at me as I called Travis.

Bingo bango, 35 minutes later, the doors were unlocked, and this little girl at least pretended to look sheepish.

Feelings and Doggos

The weekend after Aiden died, Alex talked about her non-stop.  Then on Monday, we started taking care of our neighbors' dog.  On that day, all talk of Aiden stopped, and he only talked about the neighbors' dog.  On Wednesday, we were walking the dog, and I asked him how he was feeling about everything with Aiden.  He looked at me like I was the dumbest person residing on Earth and said, "I am really really sad."  I took a breath to stop the tears and explained that I wasn't sure since he wasn't talking about her at all anymore so I wanted to check with him.  He replied with, "Well, I just realized I don't need to make other people sad with my sad stuff."  Then no amount of breathing was going to stop the tears.  I gently told him that was very kind, but to please remember he can always talk to Travis and me no matter what.  And in true Alex form, he brought levity to the situation by saying, "Besides...it's more fun to talk about a dog that's alive."

When we got back to the house, I asked him what he was thinking about getting a new dog.  Not shockingly, he was still very much in favor.  And when I asked what he thought about the timing of said new dog, I was informed the sooner the better.  So I showed him a couple dogs I had spotted on Petfinder.com.  And theeeeeennnnnn, this happened:

Allow me to introduce Lulu.  I have decided her full name is Lucille Julius.  Alex insists her middle name needs to be "Sweet."  Given her demeanor, I'm having a hard time disagreeing.  Welcome to the family Lulu.

Take to the Friendly Skies

We are going on a trip in July!  Shhhh!  Don't tell the boys yet.  I cannot deal with 4 months of "how long until we leave?!?!" on repeat.  We are headed to Jamaica, so passports are needed.  Travis and I are good, but the boys needed to get theirs.  We went on Wednesday.  Good gravy.  I cannot believe I am thinking about putting these two on an airplane.

Alex was mostly well behaved, but there were spurts of him letting Sam get them both riled up.  Sam on the other hand was out of control.  I don't know if we need to get him out in public more or what, but he goes loony when we are out of the house.  It doesn't matter where.  Alex's school, restaurants, Menard's, funeral homes.  Doesn't matter.  He goes insaneo.  Mostly a lot of running and "tripping" and rolling around on the floor laughing.  It's super fun and is a perfect time to display my stellar parenting skills under the watchful judging gaze of other adults.

Things settled for a hot minute once we got into the little room to shuffle all the paperwork.  But as soon as Sam got acclimated to that room, he was back into wild mode.  I am not exaggerating when I say he went from pretending to be a cat to a dog to a rabbit to a frog in a one minute time span.  The postal worker just looked at us like, "Wow.....good luck."

And then we had to take their pictures.  That was ridiculous.  Alex immediately did his weird squinted eyes, closed mouth smile face.  The postal worker told him that he didn't need to smile and needed to have his eyes open.  So then Alex sat up super straight, completely dropped any smile, and bugged his eyes open.  That did three things:  1.  Made the postal worker laugh.  2.  Made Travis blurt out, "Dude, you don't need to look like a serial killer!"  3.  Made Alex's eyes hurt and water because it was bright outside the window he was facing, and his light blue eyes "melt" in bright light.

Sam wouldn't sit still and then did his best impersonation of a suspicious Dr. Seuss character.

Some custom's agent is gonna get a kick out of these passport pictures...

Life is Hard Sometimes

It's been a tough couple of weeks.  Aiden hurt herself and went into a rapid decline.  Our hearts broke and we said goodbye to her on Friday.

Rest easy sweet girl.

Sticky Situation

Sam is becoming an adept stick hunter and gatherer.  Any time he's outside, he is on the hunt for a good stick.  The attributes of a good stick depend on what he decides the use will be that day.  The other day, he found what was declared as The Best Stick EVER, and carried it with him for quite some time.  We had to run an errand and of course the request for The Best Stick EVER to come with us was granted.  This of course meant I needed to steele my patience as the car ride would be narrated with reasons why this stick was in fact The Best Stick EVER.

After the fourth time I declined a request to look at The Best Stick EVER, a new request was lobbed from the backseat:

"Mama!  Look at how much of this stick I have licked already!"

Perfect.

Betrayal

One just let a silent fart go.  One feels betrayed.

This picture was followed by Sam yelling, "Ugggggghhhhh AL-EX!  Why would you DO that?!"

My Little Sunshine