"elementary my dear watson" is really an overstatement

a couple of mysteries have recently presented themselves, so we've been doing some sleuthing lately.

case #1: the case of the tortured book
one of q's favorite books is "peekaboo kisses." you're hesitant i know, but trust me on this one - give it a chance and you won't be able to put it down. a true page turner.

anyway the gist is, you open little flaps to reveal furry puppies or fluffy kittens all dying to give you a kiss (goodbye epic novels, hello baby books) and the climax comes when you get to the mouse (spoiler alert ahead)

peekaboo i see...

squeaky mouse kisses!! (i can recite this thing in my sleep)

and, get this, when you hit his little belly, he squeaks! until one sad day - it was probably overcast and rainy out - when we got to the mouse and pressed the belly, it was completely silent. no noises to be heard. not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. (sorry, i couldn't resist.) 

i flipped the page over and to my utter horror saw THIS!

someone ripped the squeaker right out of the book! now, i know you're thinking "whoa - where do you even start to narrow down the list of suspects in a case like this?" but in truth, possibilities weren't as extensive as you might think. there were two potential culprits:

they both look innocent enough, but i've witnessed first-hand the destruction these guys can do to inanimate objects.

first, we'll look at teddy. sweet innocent teddy. the boy assures me on a regular basis that this pooch can do no wrong. but that's just because teddy conveniently waits for the boy to leave to start his mass destruction of helpless toys. take for example:

a poor little stuffed dog (that started off as quincy's to make the matter worse) ripped away from his own nose. all from the paws of sweet innocent teddy. 

and if a toy has a squeaker in it - like this baseball thingy - forget about it. teddy is like a squeaker-seeking missile when it comes to finding squeakers and getting to them in as violent way as possible... i never in a million years thought i'd use the word "squeaker" so much in one sentence.  

and then let's not forget about this little episode of toy devastation...

in other words, i wouldn't put it past teddy to rip the squeaker out of a defenseless children's book. 

on the other hand, while i've never once seen milo rip a squeaker out of a toy, i have seen him demolish paper bags, take toys away from quincy on a regular basis and just be plain annoying at whatever cost. plus, he always comes in to finish teddy's dirty work (conveniently usually right as the boy gets home so milo looks like the evil one all the time). teddy will take the squeaker out of a toy, but leave the stuffing unharmed. milo sniffs out toy stuffing like...well, a dog... on the hunt. 

look at that - he's even got stuffing on his chin as if we weren't completely convinced of his guilt.

so, it's a toss up. it's hard to take this case any further because neither suspects are wiling to stand trial to defend their innocence. which sadly means, justice may never be served for "peekaboo kisses."


case #2: the case of the traveling flamingo
as if losing sleep over that isn't enough, now we've got a mysterious pink plastic flamingo floating around our block!

it showed up one day out of the blue standing proudly in the field across the street from our house. a few days later, it suddenly moved to our next-door neighbor's front yard. so, when it landed itself in our yard a few days after that, i naturally assumed my neighbor had stuck it there.

(the boy pretending to not be worried at all about these shenanigans) 

she whole-heartedly denied it though and swore she had nothing to do with it being both in her yard and our yard. so, we have a savvy flamingo transporter on the loose

sigh, how will any of these mysteries every be solved?

i am happy to report however that one case can be closed. i finally found the easter egg that milo hid two weeks ago! ironically, he hid it in my neighbor's yard... which is why i wouldn't put it past her to plant a plastic flamingo in our yard... i bet if we look long enough, we'll find a lonely squeaker without a home buried somewhere over there too

happy birthday milo and teddy!

remember how teddy and milo coincidentally have the same birthday only 8 years apart? how bizarre is that? we're pretty sure that the movie "twins" was based off of them because, well... just take a gander:

anyway, what that means is, when their birthday rolls around, we pull out all the stops. i baked them some dog cookies that i fully intended to cut into little bone-shapes to complete the look, but it turns out that a lot of "fully intended" things never get accomplished once a baby's in your home. so, i just rolled the dough into little balls and they came out looking more like people cookies.

so i guess it's my fault for leaving them out on a plate on our kitchen counter where the boy thought they were for him... i didn't notice when he started eating them since we had guests over (man, i'm glad he didn't offer any to the guests!), but afterward, he admitted to me that those cookies were an all-time low in my baking history. i assured him that the dogs didn't think so.

on the same list of "fully intended" but yet to be accomplished things to do was "get the dogs a new toy." i have to be honest, this was really more for me than for the dogs. last christmas, i got them a tennis ball turtle. i couldn't find a picture of it (i'm really having bad luck with finding good pictures online these days, huh?) but here's the idea:

really cute, right? i thought so, too until teddy ripped apart the tennis ball leaving only a poor naked turtle. not so cute...

but teddy loves the dumb thing! he carries it around with him EVERYWHERE! he's even gotten it into a family photo! (notice it hanging out of his mouth like a slimy serpent) (p.s. look how cute Q is. ah.) (p.s.s. milo looks like a muppet these days because a third thing on the "fully intended" list is give him a hair cut...)

so, without asking anyone's permission and making sure teddy wasn't looking, i finally threw that creepy thing away... or at least i thought i did. the next morning, lo and behold, guess what was outside of our trashcan

oops, my bad. must have missed the trashcan when i threw it away the first time. so, in it went again, never to be seen again. right? wrong! the next morning:

what in the?? now i'm really creeped out by this dumb toy... so, i threw it away again, tied the trashbag shut, took it outside and burned it. okay, i'm lying about burning it, but i did take it outside to the dumpster. but now that i'm thinking about it, i should have burned it because that little monster will probably find its way out of the dumpster and be staring me right in the face when i wake up tomorrow morning. dang it. guess i won't be sleeping tonight.

a bad case of middle child syndrome

i've always heard about the baby of the family having a tough time when a new addition comes, but i had no idea it might refer to my dog...

the allusive "they" say that when babies get knocked out of their position as the youngest, they can show signs of regression and anger toward their parents.

since quincy's arrival, milo spends half his day in his crate BY HIS CHOOSING. he saunters into it - making sure we're watching him and then sighs a huge sigh and sticks his head out to remind us that he's in there - denying us all the honor of his presence on our laps or by our feet.

when she cries, he has a tendency to grab onto my leg as if to say, "come on mom - you don't need that. let's run away together, just you and me. leave that little annoying thing behind for good!"

so, in effort to remedy milo's sad (and pathetic - let's be honest) situation, we've pulled out all the stops.

the boy randomly saw this at the store the other day and how could he not buy it (have i mentioned lately how much i love the boy)?

yes, it's really called petchup and yes it really looks like ketchup. neither of us are brave enough to eat it to see if it also tastes like ketchup... i am proud to say this tasty (maybe?) little treat is made in colorado! oh, colorado, you're the best.

we've allowed milo the chore of prewasher

and, while the boy's parents were in town, we were playing imaginiff. the game requires eight players and if you have less than that (we did), then you have to have ghost players that everybody knows. Our ghost players included quincy, teddy and milo (because who doesn't want their newborn and two dogs as part of the game?)

unfortunately, i don't think having milo as a player boosted his ego much. when questions like "who would most likely board, and feel at home on, a ufo" came up, we all picked milo... ah our little alien puppy.

in other news, even with two four-legged animals as options, the boy's dad feels he's the most similar to the mythical flying horse, the pegasus... we didn't inquire further.

the first three weeks

it's weird how once you have a baby, all of a sudden posters like this make you very much wish this poor person finds his gloves that his mom made him. i'm also a little bit intrigued to know what the reward for found mittens might be...

good luck, kid!

in other news, i scheduled to get our piano tuned the other day and when i opened the door for the tuner, lo and behold, phillip seymore hoffman was standing on my front porch. i tried to take a picture to send to the boy, but it's hard to get a good, discreet shot of someone who's facing a wall to fix a piano.
but come on, who could even deny that that's clearly phillip seymore's bum??

so when he was telling me all of the things he fixed on our piano and was giving me a bill, i wasn't really listening - i mean, who could with such celebrity status in the same room? instead, i was holding my phone by my side and trying to get a better shot of him.

i mean seriously - let's compare:


and in other news, the boy got a new tat


quincy's found a love in music


milo's discovered that boppy's make for the perfect bed


and quincy's perfecting the art of both body and face contorting


ah. i love my family

snow day

one of my favorite things about having a little dog manifests itself when there's 31 inches billion (and still falling!) of snow on the ground.
it's a cruel world for dogs when their toilets are covered by more snow than they can even stand in.

he'd jump into a pile of snow, disappear for a second, try digging an area where he could at least squat, give up and jump back out. Half a dozen attempts left him doing what every dog despises doing - peeing on the patio

and when he comes back inside, he's got a nice little set of nature-made UGGs on (please ignore my lovely face).

...one of my favorite things about snow days is that it gives you the uninterrupted time to plow through your entire inbox, organize all your files, practice the guitar, read a little bit and still have time to do things like take pictures of your dog peeing outside and then blog about it.

babies r bite size

everytime i go into a baby store, like babies r us, i'm so overwhelmed by all the "necessary" crap in there, my face probably looks something like this.

luckily, i've discovered a couple of things to help make it all better for me:

1. www.babysteals.com (not to be confused with babyseals.com). i've become obsessed with this site. just ask the boy. here's the skinny - every day at 9am MST, they post a new deal of the day. only one deal every day. that's it. and only a limited number of whatever said deal is. which makes me want to buy everything regardless of what it is just because it means i'm getting one before they're sold out. like, why would i ever want this, but i bet if it showed up on babysteals.com, i'd buy it anyway.

and to top it off, they tell me right there how much of a discount i'm getting on the item. which makes me REALLY want to buy whatever it is just so i can say i got a great deal on it. they've really tapped into the female psyche on this one..

i'd rather not talk about how many times "baby steals" has shown up in our last few credit card bills...

2. milo's so (not) excited to have a baby sister that he's willingly offered to help sample some baby things for us. which is great because he's bite size, just like the baby will be

bassinet: check

baby sling: check

he didn't quite fit into the sleep sack i just made, but it's a little girly for him anyway...

then the boy reminded me that milo walks around where there's lots of poop. and he rolls in dirt on a regular basis. and then i reminded the boy that our baby will most likely try EATING poop and dirt at some point. and that's when i won that discussion.

...and then i secretly went upstairs and started the washing machine.

proxy baby

sometimes i have conversations with milo that go like this: 

me: there are way cooler kid toys than dog toys a lot of the time

milo: i hear ya

me: maybe you should act like a human kid sometimes so you can play with those cool things

milo: word

and that's how we got to this point

dogs are people too

i was at the store the other day (shameless plug for the love of my life, target. i could live there and be perfectly content, i'm pretty sure) and i saw this


and i literally scoffed to myself and thought "that little dog doesn't shed! it has hair, not fur." (something i wouldn't have known two years ago) This guy, on the other hand, sheds like a PETA member who's just been told she's actually wearing a REAL fur coat:

so then i took mr. teddy to the groomers where they gave him a 4-hour bath and brush to get all that extra fur outta there. here's milo and teddy riding in the car - for whatever reason, milo thought there was cooler stuff to look at out of teddy's window. (you can gaurantee one of two things about a person driving with their windows down on a 15-degree day... she either is a smoker or has dogs... or both, but i only have dogs)


other ways milo likes to ride in the car:



teddy came back from the groomer smelling and looking his best. and he fell in love with his groomer (this place's motto is, "love the snot out of every dog that comes in by using enough baby talk to induce vomiting out of every dog owner that comes in") i was excited. i even swept up all the loose doggie hair on the floor while he was gone to prepare for this new, less hairy phase in our relationship. an hour later, meghan came over. teddy greeted her at the door with this



so pretty much i just paid for my dog to have a 4-hour massage.... who does that?? so, turns out teddy's not good at not shedding. what he IS good at however, is knowing to put his toys away



i can't blame him really. apples and tennis balls look the same to me too.

milo, on the other hand, is the world's best saver. he buries EVERYTHING. i've found underwear, pens, rolls of tape... buried in the back yard. the problem with burying stuff is then other dogs can find it. like when the neighbor dog took milo's toy home with her. for whatever reason, this is how it was returned to us. i found it sitting in the front yard

maybe my neighbors wanted me to dust it for fingerprints to prove that it wasn't their dog who stole it

moments... it's all about moments

(isn't this an awesome picture? it looks like crew is gibson's little guardian angel and he's holding on by actually biting gib's shoulder. p.s. i've accepted the fact that i will probably look like this everyday when i have my own kids... unslept and unshowered... hope you don't mind, bill!)

some of my favorite instances this past week...

1. seeing this at the denver airport. sometimes i wonder if maybe i'm just vegetarian so i can see what kind of weird questions people might ask me. and then it reminded me about this time when i went on a date with this guy and he was so floored that i was vegetarian. he didn't know what to do with me. so he took me to 7-11 for dinner... because "there's plenty of vegetarian food there"... right...

2. helping out at this community college music event where bach's musical offering was being dissected for an hour. of course i, and all of the other summoned musicians, assumed (maybe because we practiced about 40 minutes worth of music) that most of the event would highlight sections of the piece using...get this... actual musicians and instruments... instead, we were cut off after about 3 minutes and replaced with this ENTIRE video. i'm pretty sure this is some creepy fantasy the composer/guy who put this together has. i mean, who wouldn't want a choir of japanese anime babes singing bach to you with electronic voices? needless to say, it was a very informational event

3. watching my darling nephews for a couple of days, which included listening to the indiana jones theme song at least two dozen times over the course of one hour and posing a lot for my aspiring photographer nephew, gibson who LOVED taking pictures on his auntie's cell phone... and then going through the 500 plus pictures he took and getting a kick out of the perspective of a 3 year old and what they view as "kodak moments"

caught in the act, crew! ... don't worry mom, we washed the sippy cup really well after that...

i'm not at all sure how gibson caught this - it's like four completely different pictures in one. way to get experimental, buddy!

of course, what kid doesn't want twenty pictures of his cool sandals? maybe gibson's destiny is in consumer advertising...

and, of course, my personal favorite. 

4. after keeping teddy and milo cooped up in the house for the entire morning and into the afternoon, we decided to treat them with a trip to the park. where teddy immediately b-lined it into the river and milo a) stole some poor little kid's capri sun right out of his hand, and b) rolled around for a good 5 minutes in the remains of a dead mouse. so then it was back to the house for baths and more cooping up. 

i love my life