Do your business, Josie!

With Pat off to work at 7:45, it fell to me to be the main care-giver on this, Josie's first weekday with us. In most ways, that was a great privilege. Alone-time with Josie: on-the-floor play, romping-in-the-garden play, and some time just each of us doing our own thing, but still in each other's company, in the kitchen. She's started to just lie down once in a while and rest her snout on her oversized paws -- a sign of relaxed adaptation. She's such a fine pup, so quick to adapt ...to most things anyway. Now, the book says that she's supposed to need to relieve herself 15 minutes after any meal or after having water. So I'm out there faithfully, repeating the encouraging words "do your business, Josie!" just like the book says, for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. No business in her designated soiling area. Later on, however, she did manage soundlessly to dispense a puddle of urine on the kitchen floor. By the end of the day I was a mite tired of the dynamic. As I expressed my frustration, Patricia sought to correct my various theories about the day. I told her to please just give me a hug and be done with it. Some more time romping with Josie and Elizabeth, and then Josie and Michael, and all of us in the kitchen before bed, and all was well again.

"The brothers said we would see changes in her every day," said Elizabeth just now. Yesterday Josie's ears curved toward each other like a ballerina's arms; now they are stiffer. We've changed, too: we're much more diligent about what's on the floor: rubber bands, bits of wool, onion skin, marbles, dust bunnies have been swept out of the kitchen, out from under the piano, and out of the livingroom corners.

Cats and Canine

Yesterday was a series of surprises. Today no less so. First has been how calm Josie is despite all the changes in her life. In her crate in Elizabeth's room, she slept through the night (we didn't--we kept one ear open at all times in case she needed to go outside). The second has been how much she enjoys eating grass. And flowers.

The next surprise was that she's very smart. Despite this immense change in her life, she has never acted disoriented, but immediately learned the route from the kitchen to her soiling grounds outside, and after a first encounter learned to be wary in the living room of Jack, our black-and-white mouser, whose hostility makes Josie yelp.

Also unexpected was that Cinder, our sluggish black cat, several times last evening and today, approached the new puppy to initiate detente. She's never met another animal; Josie's never met a cat. Each time, after staring intently at one another, they would approach slowly and touched noses. Then we would hustle Josie outside.

By the time we arose this morning, Michael had installed a pet gate at the kitchen entrance; now the animals can view each other at their leisure.

Enter JOSIE

Who could have predicted anything about this day? It has already been beyond-wonderful, though not without challenges. I write in a moment of eerily blissful silence. Josie – that's right, not Chaka, not Haru – lies sleeping in the crate by Elizabeth’s bed. Who knows what the night will bring? It is 9:30 and we are all utterly exhausted.

We left later this morning than we’d wanted to, and got a bit lost, but pulled up to the central chapel at New Skete literally at the dot of 12:00 noon, which was the agreed time to meet Brother John. He is a humble and straight-forward man, who got straight to the first order of business: meet the parents. We went out back into the main kennels for the adult dogs and met Goldi first – that’s our pup's mom. We’d seen her at our last visit, licking at her new litter, which had already contained our puppy. She’s bright in color, relatively slight in size, and very even tempered. Not so the father, Dux. He’s large, darker, dignified, more intense, more powerful (though his owner, Br. Luke, says he's a total pushover).

The kids ran on ahead to the puppy kennels while we took a bit more time with Br. John, and by the time we’d gotten there, they were in a room playing with …our puppy. It was immediately plain to us all that this was a perfect little dog. Dark body, lighter legs and light paws, very nice coat, a lighter face, with ears that have already begun to sit up, but tuck sweetly together. She has a great combination of curious playfulness and self-possession. The monks are wonderful that way, putting so much into socializing their dogs. But as her PAT (Puppy Aptitude Test) scores showed (!), she is also pretty wonderful to begin with.

We all played with her very naturally; then the kids walked her outside for a long time while we settled all the paperwork. When I went out briefly to see how things were, Michael reported to me, “We decided, together, that it would be ‘Josie.’” That was a big concession for him, because he’d voted for Ella, or several other names than Josie, but saw how much it meant to his sister to name the dog.

We sat at lunch with Br. Christopher and heard lots of great and wise advice, in fact more than our already-overwhelmed senses could take in. By 3:00 we were off for home. The 3.5 hour car ride was less problematic than we imagined – Josie was not too difficult to settle, sometimes in her crate, sometimes in Elizabeth’s lap. A couple stops for her to relieve herself.

Back at the house, so many discoveries, and the beginning of more challenging realities — starting with the cats, who were emphatically not pleased with the new addition to the family. That, in turn, upset Michael greatly, and we all had to work hard (some more and some less successfully) at not giving each other too many opinions on how we should each be handling or not handling the pup. I made a trip with Michael to the pet store (open late) for some last minute supplies, and that separation was very healthy for all.

Pat is now asleep as I type, Cinder is on the bed too, Jack roaming around (his tail is finally back to its normal dimensions, after some serious puffing). And like I say, who knows what the night will bring? I’m on duty for the first part of the night if she kicks up a fuss or needs to go outside. I know, in any case, that we have a totally wonderful puppy, and I can’t wait to spend time with her tomorrow.

Blastoff!

Peter has piled the things we'll need on the trip upstate: dog crate, Ipods, lists of questions for the brothers, Elizabeth's thank-you note (hand-drawn, signed as coming from the whole family), Michael's thank-you (pasted together on the computer, self-signed).

Serendipity marked last evening. With 18 hours left before picking up the pup, we watched a PBS nature program called Dogs That Changed the World. For as long as I can remember, I've thought of dogs as just pets that people indulge themselves with, that working dogs are the exception. The show laid that notion to rest. Dogs deveoped out of wolvesonly about 15,000 years ago. They evolved because of the emergence of cities and their midden hiaps. The wolves least afraid of popel, the tamest, wre most successful at feeding. In mating with each other, they rapidly evolved into proto-dogs, probably within a single person's lifetime. Humans quickly grasped their usefulness and civilization then developed in ways that would have been impossible without canines: large herds, penetrating into the Arctic, and so on.

It must have had an effect on Michael, too: as we later watched a bit of the monks' training video and saw Br. Mark elevate one of the puppies in a mild stress test, he suddenly said, "We could call her Ella." (Now that's a name we could live with.)

Elizabeth: "But I like Josie."

And so we're off.

Countdown: One Day

"We're surrounded by trains!" Michael announced yesterday, when we traveling into the city for "Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day." Every year my company puts on different events for employees' children; they usually include a financial education component, a talk by one of the senior executives, and a volunteer activity to benefit a local charity. I looked left and right out our train windows and, he was right, trains were surging by on each side. Elizabeth looked up and then went back to her magazine.

After I picked them up from the formal events of the day and gave them lunch at the company cafeteria, I brought them back to my office. Elizabeth found some pens that she liked and drew "snapshots" of my desk and the rest of my office. Michael played some electronic games. I took them into the archives, where they helped inventory some papers and filled out a donation form. And, the highlight every year, they hunted out the old IBM Selectric and laboriously typed out notes to their dad.

Both children have grown much since last year, and not just the three or four inches in height. We've especially been able to see the effect of future puppy-ownership on Elizabeth. Without being asked, she helps round up the cats for their twice-daily doses of antibiotics. On the weekends, she tracks whether Michael has fed them. She has been cleaning her room, clearing the floor of anything small that the puppy might swallow, in anticipation of its sleeping next to her bed for the first few nights. She takes the initiative to help in setting up the table for dinner. She occasionally even volunteers an opinion, a feeling, or a thought.

The change in Michael is less profound. He doesn't much welcome change, ever, and our bringing a canine into the house is no exception. He often says that Jack is his best friend, and that the cats will have to live upstairs as long as we have a dog. But he loves the services at New Skete and, back when we were looking for a parish to join, strenuously advocated our attending services there-despite the seven-hour roundtrip. Typical of Michael, though, there are few things about which he doesn't have an opinion, and the puppy's future name is no exception. He liked April when Elizabeth first mooted it as a name weeks ago. We've been holding fairly regular brainstorming sessions. We drew up a list of names of Miyazaki heroines, honing them to Kiki and Haru. Michael, "But I like April, I think it's a great name." Peter mentioned Chaka, after one of his favorite singers. Michael: "I like April, what's wrong with April?" Unrelated to the dog, I was talking about the name Josephine; Elizabeth shortened it to Josie. It's her new favorite contender, which she mentioned to Peter. Michael, overhearing, said, "But I like April."

But the main thing, I think, is to remain open to various names. You never know until you meet someone, what his or her name should be. Our children were known as Bébé for the first three days of their lives (they were born in Geneva), until we could see what they should be called. That may be difficult to get across. Michael this evening announced: "I don't like the name Josie." At least he's changed tacks.

Tonight we'll watch a PBS special about the history of dogs in the world; tomorrow we dose the cats and climb in the car to New Skete.

Countdown: Three and a Half Days

My company wants its stock price to go up, so last Wednesday it started firing large numbers of its employees across the country and across the globe. My boss spent the last few days packing up his office; the UPS guy carted off the cartons today. I went yesterday to bid farewell to his boss, who was the director of our department, who had built the department virtually from the ground up, and who was willing to risk that, despite my higher degree in the literature of a small Balkan country, I was fit for employment.

Everywhere we look, the holes in our network of colleagues, the keys to getting work done in a global corporation, are growing. We're all remapping our ways of doing things but otherwise keeping our heads down. It'll be good, this weekend, to kneel down on the floor and greet a little warm creature that doesn't know much about anything.

Countdown: Four Days

Four more days of ...of what? Of peace. Of total quiet in the house at certain points. But four more days bereft of all kinds of other things too, like (I'm guessing) adventure, fun, craziness, sweetness, upturned schedules, and whatever else. Four days, too, of anticipation, preparation (wash crate, get crate pad, remove daughter from crate, etc.)

We keep reading the New Skete books, especially about the first moments and days of puppy ownership. Again, full of common-sense advice, often specific, and sometimes less specific than I'd like (wait: is this where I scold gently or firmly, after how many days?) -- and then Pat comes with a very wise reminder: "Hey, let's remember that we don't have to get this perfect all the time." That's right! But I do hope we get her house-trained kinda soon...

Top contenders for names: Chaka (after my favorite soul singer, Chaka Khan), Haru, Kiki (the last two being characters of two great Miyazaki movies), and I think Ginger, or April, or Clover, the last ones sounding a bit prosaic to my ears. We'll see. It's hard for Elizabeth to wait on the naming, she wants so much to give this pup her identity already.

And so we all wait.

When I was growing up, our pets never seemed to need much care. We had Airedales, but the fluffy, unkempt kind, not the classic, sharply shorn kind. They ate dry kibble and a dinner of the family's leftovers. The cats roamed indoors and out, and ate what they caught alongside some dry cat food. We only washed them for the sport of it and when the fleas couldn't be ignored (Houston fleas are the size of sesame seeds).

The first hint I had that this could be different was one summer that I was staying in Maine with a friend. I came out the door of her farmhouse and found her on the lawn bending over her husky. As I moved closer, I realized that she was brushing his teeth. "I don't like dog breath in my face when I'm driving," she said, referring to an upcoming trip to Boston, when Seek would be riding in the back seat of the car. Then she got the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed off his shedding fur.

This came to mind recently, because we took the cats in for their annual rabies shots and the vet discovered that they both have gingivitis, one severely. They claim--could this be true?--that pets can start developing tooth problems at about three years old. I guess ours are typical, then. Nearly four figures later, ten tooth extractions, a basket full of antibiotics, and a damaged cat-owner relationship, we have a cured cat, instructions to brush the teeth of both felines regularly, and some prescription anti-tartar food. Pity no one thought to brush their teeth when they were kittens, they don't intend to get used to it.

That might be why New Skete recommends brushing your dog's teeth from puppyhood--who cares about dog breath, it's the vet bills that make you reel.

I’ll tell you more later about New Skete – the community, the life, its place in the world and in the Church. But for now, a word about its place in our preparations for getting a dog. Their main dog books – How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, and The Art of Raising a Puppy, are the equivalent for us of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. They emphasize – and it’s not for nothing – that it’s best to use the word “adopting” a puppy rather than “getting,” because it’s really going to entail a change of daily (and nightly) life. So, basing ourselves on these great books (each is a massively compelling read, so practical, so full of common sense) we’ve been getting the house ready, and getting ourselves psychologically and otherwise ready.

Having two cats, as we do, is one thing. That’s been pretty much nothing but great and very easy. The way I’m looking at the puppy thing is – anticipating great joys, fun, a new relationship, yes, but also lots of effort. And like with kids, a further sacrifice of freedom, of your own will. Did you think you’d be able to read just now? Or work in your home office? Think again! Puppy has to go out! It’s been a while since our kids were super-dependent – Elizabeth, the younger of our two, is 9. So we're a little out of practice. Though I have to say a part of me, though dreading some of the commitment and sacrifice, is also really looking forward to its rewards. Because what great, rewarding relationship is without commitment, right guys?

If you challenge your kids, you never know what will happen. "No" is safer. This whole thing got started about two years ago, when Elizabeth was seven. She'd been begging for a puppy for months and we'd steadily been saying No. I pointed out that we were too busy to take care of a pup--I had just gone back to work fulltime--and that she was too young to take responsibility for one. After a little tussle over that, it came down that, if she wanted to prove that she could take care of a dog, she'd have to prove it by feeding the cats every day as a start. And even then she wouldn't get a dog until she had reached the elevated age of ten. It was evening. She went to the pantry, took out a can of cat food, divided it between the two cats' dishes, and has been feeding them ever since.

Don't get me wrong, though: excitement is building in the family and outside it. We took the cats to the vet yesterday for their annual exams and told the vet that we would soon be bringing the new puppy in for an introductory visit, as the monks recommend. She liked the idea: "Otherwise, from thestart, we grab them and jab them, and poke things into them, and then we wonder why they don't like coming to see us." As she probed Jack's gums--he has severe gingivitis with gums the color of her Brazilian Fire nail polish--she told us that she'd had German shepherds herself, and had learned of the New Skete breeders when she was in grade school (she's young). Telling her that there are also a couple of other NSS in the area makes being here feel almost like a being in a neighborhood, something new. I wouldn't have thought getting a dog would have such an effect. We always had Ouachita Airedales when I was growing up, but never knew anyone else who had one.