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.