I was at an art opening the other night because my friend's band was playing and ran into a lot of people I hadn't seen in awhile. "So what have you guys been up to?" a few of them asked.

"Well, we have this dog cart. . ."

Frankly, for the last month life hasn't been about much else. Every morning, the kids and the dog get more and more antsy until we take it out. Every afternoon, after the boy naps, we drag it out to the playground and gradually all the neighborhood kids show up, and before I know it I'm giving dog wagon rides to everyone under four-feet tall, all around the neighborhood. This could be the start of a new venture; add a chicken petting zoo and a free trampoline and we're in business.

[I finally put together that "how to build a dirt-cheap dog cart" post; you can see it here]

I have spent the last four years of my life as a beast of burden, schlepping the kids and all their gear around, and I must admit a real pleasure in shifting that load to another creature. I put those two kids in the wagon and watch the dog trot merrily down the sidewalk bearing their weight and suddenly I can move like Gene Kelly. Even without the sprightly tap-dancing, the whole contraption creates something of a spectacle. Everywhere we go, cars stop moving in the road while cell phones point at us from open windows. Even a female mounted cop rubbernecked when she walked past us down Gratiot Ave:

I do prefer to keep it away from roads (we only take it along a road on our way to the market), and luckily there's a mile-long below-grade bike trail that runs through our neighborhood. Down there, I can even let them go without holding the leash. I am considering rigging up a simple system of reigns and a brake for these moments. Giddyup, the boy shouts. This is really fun, the girl shouts back at me, over and over, as I race to catch up.

There is a part of me that wishes I could just take the kids in their dog wagon to the grocery store or the pizza parlor without causing a scene, but I understand it's out of the ordinary. It's the sort of thing that's easier to get away with in Detroit than it would be elsewhere; I can't imagine doing it in Park Slope, and even though I wish we didn't always cause any scene there is something to be said for the number of smiles we create during every trip we take out the front door. I imagine this is sort of what it's like to be outrageously attractive, to have strangers smile all the time or say nice things or buy you drinks. I feel pretty lucky to have rigged up something that creates so many tiny moments of joy.

And yet, we've had a few nasty confrontations. One lady saw the dog's naturally white muzzle and assumed he was older than his four years, telling us that he was "way to old to be doing that much work." Another woman shook her head and finger at me, "You're putting your children's lives in the hands of that dog," to which I later wish I'd replied, When we take any big dog, or any street dog into our homes, don't we all? I looked at Wendell and knew I trusted him completely, but couldn't get too angry at this woman. She didn't know into what good paws I've entrusted my children.

* * * * *

We adopted Wendell more than three years ago. The guy who brought him to the shelter said he found him wandering alone near 7 Mile and John R, a particularly rough spot in a rough town for dogs. And yet he came to us so mild-mannered and eager to please. We have this strange conviction that he endured so much misery on the streets he still doesn't realize that our small gestures of ownership aren't worthy of his goodness, his near-perfect behavior.  There, I said it: he is almost a perfect dog. I haven't written much about that because there isn't much to say about perfection. Sure it would be more entertaining to regale you with Marley & Me-style hi-jinks, but other than the occasional smelly dog fart we don't have much to complain about. It is almost daily we remind ourselves of that decisive moment at the animal shelter, knowing that this particular creature was either destined for a needle the next day or the next decade in our home, and we tell ourselves that we definitely made the right decision: we definitely got the best one.

I read an article once in the Washington Post where some woman said of her lovely daughter adopted from China, "I think we got the best one." This is something you could never say about a genetic child (you should feel it, sure, but never say it), but I found it so endearing to read those words. It was so beautiful, I think, to see such an expression of falling so deeply in love with a child she had no part in creating.

In the same vein, I hope you will forgive me for stealing a bit of that sentiment and apply it to our mutt, for we had nothing at all to do with him. We never trained him. He came to us this way from the streets. He has never strayed more than a few feet from our own. True, he could be a better dock jumper, but he makes up for it with proven Frisbee catching and tree climbing skills. He has tolerated the abuses of infant fingers and toddler rides without so much as rolling one brown eye, and yet he becomes all teeth and throat the moment anyone jiggles our doorknob. He pulls our kids around the neighborhood with protective purpose, and pride.

He's a good one, guys. A good friend. Almost as good as yours, I bet.

If you have any comments about this post, I'd love to see you add them to the kind words already left at the first post, here. 

 
When I was ten I spent the winter reading a lot of Jack London and building a dog sled. After cutting the wood and nailing it all together, I set it out in the snow and tied it to our youthful Labrador Retriever, ordering her to mush. She just sat there mulishly and gave me a look that told me to get a goddamn Siberian Husky.

One of the best things about being an incredibly childish adult is that there's nobody to tell you that you can't use the power tools. Or in this case, a simple ratchet and screwdriver, because that's all I used to turn our old jogging stroller into a wagon that our German Shorthaired Pointer has been joyfully pulling around the neighborhood for a week. And with this I have further cemented my reputation as a total nutjob among all our neighbors:

 

That double jogging stroller gave us a wonderful summer of use, but it had front alignment issues and it was taking up a lot of space in our basement. When I was trying to figure out how to build an axle for a dog wagon, I remembered the jogging stroller and just took it apart to use the back axle and wheels and then detached some of the tubing to create the wagon shafts. I used about twelve $1.59 hose clamps to attach everything together, knowing that I would have to make adjustments later and not wanting to drill anything yet. But the clamps (which require only a standard-head screwdriver) have turned out to be really strong. I took the handlebar seat from the Popscycle and attached it with a five inch bolt between the foot rests and an extra large clamp in the rear:

I can take it off again pretty quickly when we want to go for a bike ride. I'm still working on a second seat; right now the girl will occasionally sit in the basket on a broke-down toy horse we found at the thrift store. I'm rigging up a seat belt and handle this week. Most of the time only one kid rides in it, and when we take the wagon to the market the groceries go in the basket (that was scavenged from the neighbors' trash). You could probably make something similar out of any jogging stroller (we used a Babyjogger Twinner II) or one of those kid trailers you pull behind a bike. If there's any interest, I can post a more detailed how-to so you can build one for your kids and dog(s). I'd really love to see wagon pulled by a team!

I did a lot of research on the types of carts used in recreational dog carting and I was happy to read that a two-bicycle wheel sulky like this is much easier on a dog than a heavier four-wheel wagon. I also researched the harness that the dog would need to wear, and determined I could either pay $70 for a nylon "one size fits all" harness, or make a leather one myself that fits Wendell perfectly. I found diagrams online for a standard Siwash harness and went to the thrift store and bought five or six of the best quality leather belts they had. The big coup came when I was on the way out of the store and noticed an old leather golf bag loaded with brass rings, clamps, padded leather straps, and tons of good leather, all for $3.40. I bought a bag of leather rivets and used an awl to puncture the leather and put the harness together making sure he had a nice padded piece across his chest. I had to figure out a way to keep the shafts away from his body while still allowing him to steer the wagon and after a bit of experimentation I got it right:

The shafts are just for steering; he "pulls" the wagon with leather traces. I still have a bit of fine tuning to do, but I'm pretty happy with how it all came out, using almost exclusively recycled materials and spending only around $30 for everything I needed to complete both the wagon and the harness.

* * * * *

This is the good part.

Now, I fully expect to get some nasty e-mails/comments from dog lovers telling me this is cruel. Never mind that we're not trekking across the Yukon Territory here (we're just trotting around our neighborhood). Never mind that he's pulling children, not adults. Never mind that dogs have been pulling carts for hundreds of not thousands of years. I would even agree that for some dogs this sort of thing might be cruel. Carting is not for every dog, but I will say that it is for our dog. He has boundless energy, and we went for a 5-mile run every day for several weeks before we started carting just so I could be sure he'd be in good enough shape after the long winter. He loves to be outside. It would be far more cruel to leave this dog in his crate while we played outside. His tail wags the entire time he's pulling and he dances around with excitement whenever I pull out the harness and move the wagon towards the front door. While he carts I keep hold of his leash and he pulls against the leash as though the wagon isn't even there. He wants to jog with the wagon and when I get out of breath and stop he turns to look back at me as if to say, Come on, fat ass. This is more fun if we run. I didn't even really have to train him for any of this; the first few times he was strapped in I rewarded him with treats whenever he made a confident turn or if he came when called. But this adopted Detroit street dog truly is a natural. When he started pulling the wagon with the kids, he became even more careful, as if he knew his kids were in there and it was his job to keep them safe. He even loses interest in squirrels.

Wherever we go, we hear a lot of the same comments, but my favorite so far is, Those are the luckiest kids ever. Who wouldn't want to get pulled around in a wagon by a beloved dog, his tail tickling your knees as it wags? We've taken practically every kid in the neighborhood for a ride around the block. The girl's best friend shouted, "I want to do this every day!"

Gram insists on wearing his new "cowboy" hat every time we go out in the wagon, and we have totally been dressing him like an Amish boy. I am planning to buy one of those orange reflective triangles you see on the back of buggies the next time I stop by the Feed & Seed, just in case one of those Yoder boys are on Rumspringa and don't see him as he circles the playground. 

Here's a very shaky video I made as I ran backwards ahead of the wagon trying to get some perspective other than me holding the leash. This is not how we ordinarily do this (but don't worry, we were on a very safe sidewalk and I was never more than a few steps away):

I can tell the season has officially tipped from the purr of traffic on the highway when I open the back door; millions of honey locust leaves that absorbed that sound all summer now hide the grass, leaving the sidewalks so covered that a nearsighted man might confuse them for paths of gold. The tiny leaves slink under the door and stow away in cuffs, in the tread of boots and in between dog toes. I find the cadmium-colored blades in my daughter's bedsheets, in the bathtub. Tonight I read her Keats at bedtime and she was asleep before I finished the second stanza. I continued with the third (what's the difference?) and thought about the song of SUVs on a highway, and the squirrel who'd cursed at me an hour earlier. . .

There is still a kinship with the dog, that anticipation for my wife to get home so we can both be free of their kid smells: tapioca; apple skins; urine. When we get to the edge of the park we scan it for pedestrians and other dogs. If the coast is clear I release him from his leash and he dashes towards the nearest squirrel (obliviously gathering nuts) and he tosses that fucker a few feet in the air with his snout before it recovers and scrambles up the nearest tree. He's never killed one: it's a game. He will bark ferociously and sometimes climb up after it, circling a tree twice before taking off towards the next oblivious squirrel. This may sound cruel but the critters in our neighborhood have it easy, with so much parkland and so few roads, they grow fat on the fruit of exotic trees and still have the nerve to dig up our tulips and usurp the birdfeeder. Some neighbor even scatters bread around the bases of trees for them. I figure they need a bit of terror to toughen them up should they ever encounter the squirrels from other Detroit neighborhoods with eye patches and festering bullet wounds who subsist entirely on a diet of discarded menthol filters and chicken bones.

This afternoon, we were out in the park and the dog disrupted some gray squirrel's incessant winter preparations and apparently really pissed it off. . .or maybe this one went for a snout ride last week. . . or perhaps he saw himself as some kind of squirrel Gandhi or something, because he sat on a low limb and started yelling at us. Now I don't speak squirrel, but I know the inter-species language of go fuck yourself, you motherfucking cocksucking motherfuckers when I hear it.

Being incredibly immature, I naturally threw a stick at it.

The squirrel scampered back towards the trunk and climbed up to the next series of branches and started mouthing off even worse. I chucked another stick up at him and he climbed higher while continuing to berate us, flicking his tail in what must be the squirrel equivalent of the Sicilian chin-flick. By this time I experienced what most powerful adversaries feel when facing the improbable bravery of a powerless foe: my confused anger turned into admiration. He was the Chinese guy and I was the tank. He was Spartacus and I was the guy who gets Tony Curtis sponge baths. I almost wanted to buy the little bugger a bag of pistachios and give him a high-five.

But instead I hid behind a tree and unleashed the dog as soon as the rebellious rodent climbed down out of his tree. "Give him a nose job, boy," I muttered under my breath. That'll teach him.

[While not harassing squirrels, we have been working feverishly on the Halloween costumes; pictures tomorrow]

I wish there were some ancient word for this shortening daylight, these days approaching the winter solstice---some Norwegian loanword that spread down from the Shetland Islands. If not English, I hope there is such a word in some Scandinavian tongue. Or Estonian. Inuit, surely, if it's true they have all those words for snow. The nicest I could find was the ancient Welsh description of the solstice, "the point of roughness." In our house these days, when it starts to get dark everyone starts to get restless. My daughter watches the sun set and says, as if to dare it: "Before you are down, Mama will be home." We sit anxiously at the west-facing window, my son staring at the front door in preparation for the long shrieking crawl he'll make across the floor to his mother when she walks through it.

But no one anticipates this moment more than the dog. All day he waits for the kids' mother to get home, to pick them up in her arms so his master can finally flip the switch on his off-duty light and take the dog out for a real walk, not one of those piss-or-shit utilitarian vectors out into the cold, but a chance to run as fast as he can. In the summer he might spend all day with them outside, but not when it's less than 20 degrees. When the mother finally does get home, the dog is the first to greet her, practically trampling the baby on his way, picking up the leash in his mouth and parading across the parquet. Sometimes his master fumbles for a poop bag or wants to check his e-mail. This---in the dog's eyes---is positively criminal. He will stare and grumble in canine code as clear as a telegram: "Quit fucking around-stop. Let's go now-stop. Please stop-stop."

But his master rarely delays: they have both been waiting for this moment. After ten hours of childherding, these are the first moments of silence either of them get. Outside, there's just the sound of jangling tags, falling snow striking fallen snow. The dog pulls with the strength of a workhorse until they reach the empty park. His master reaches down to his collar, thumbs at the leash clip and just like that: freedom. He darts out into the darkness and sprints three times around the park in search of pheasant, or (at the very least) squirrel.

By the end of the third circuit, his master is in the middle of the park, holding up whatever it is he'll throw, and the dog snaps to the posture of his breeding: one front paw firmly planted, the other limp at the elbow, his ears slightly lifted and his nose tense and pointed at the projectile.

In these days of lost daylight, the dog never sees where it lands. Instead he sprints in a widening circle, nose to the ground, tracking the scent, another ancient instinct of his breed. He draws dozens of pawprint circles in the fresh snow, a canine spirograph. It's not the discovery, but the search he loves. Even if it's a stick his master just picked up and touched for only a few seconds, the dog will always find his smell, whatever residue that is we leave on everything we touch, and trot back with the prize in his jaws.

Is there a word in English for the kind of love you have for a good dog, one who lets your daughter ride him around the house, one who lets your infant son pull on his lips with no more than a sorrowful gaze your way? There ought to be. When he's out there circling, I feel as free as he does. I am overcome with this kind of love. I have never known a creature with loyalty so raw and true.

Then a distant light reflects off his eyes. For a second he's an elegant, sprinting demon. What is this creature, really? What can he see in that spectral range? What is it like to live in his head, crowded with subjugation and smells? I run him until he tires, flopping down next to me happily in the snow, his wagging tail knocking up clouds of powder. I do know this: he loves to be with his family. But he also needs time to be free.

Our dog and eldest have put aside their differences, signed several important treaties, and formed an alliance. There was never any question that the kid loved this dog, but until recently her relationship with him was as one-sided as any of my disastrous high school crushes. The dog has always tolerated her, and shown some dignity in not biting off those little fingers probing his nasal cavities or pulling out fistfuls of his hair. Again, not so different from those girls I had crushes on in high school.

But with the significant decrease in attention he gets from me naturally resulting from the increased attention I must give my infant son, all that previously-unrequited toddler love doesn't seem so bad to old Wendell. I have caught him licking her face tenderly. When she cries in the middle of the night he goes to her door. She has stopped sticking things in his ears. They cuddle together and look out the window. He even lets her ride him around the house now like that rodeo monkey. So I taught her to yell, "Ride, Bucephalus, ride!" just like Colin Farrell.

Watching the two of them play together is everything you hope for when you decide to introduce a dog into your family: he runs around; she chases him until she's exhausted; I sip lemonade. Recently, my daughter has been telling me that that Wendell is her "big brother." She calls out as she chases him: "Big brother! Come back here (I'm not done dumping this water on your head.")

Toddler logic dictates that if one's big brother is a German Shorthaired Pointer, then, of course, one must therefore be a dog herself. Toddler logic also dictates that if one's canine big brother is entitled to do something, than his canine little sister should also be given every opportunity to do the same. That includes urinating out-of-doors with one leg raised, gnawing on rawhide, catching a frisbee, and sleeping in a cage. I have tried to talk her out of the back of the dog's kennel several times, with negotiations usually falling flat against a series of high-pitched barks. Don't tell CPS. Melissa once expressed her concerns about a certain child of hers pretending to be a dog (mostly requests along the lines of Punish me, I've been a very bad dog). Jealous of Wendell's leash and collar, Juniper recently asked me tie a long ribbon around one of those pink elastic headbands they make for bald, androgynous newborns so everyone knows they are girls. This became her "leash" and "collar." I've led her around the neighborhood by this contraption while she pants and growls at squirrels, cringing and wondering if it will be my fault in twenty years if she lets herself be led around the Folsom Street Fair by a chain attached to her nipples. Cue Iggy Pop.

This emulation took a difficult turn a couple weeks ago, when an organization known as Ultimate Air Dogs (The U.A.D.) came to the Detroit riverfront by our house. U.A.D. is a competitive sport invented by former Detroit Tiger's righthander Milt Wilcox involving dogs that jump as far as they can into a pool filled with water. When I first saw Milt down at the riverfront, I had to give it to him: if I was a former major league ballplayer who'd squirreled away some money over the years, I'd probably invent a competitive sport involving dogs that jump as far as they can into a pool filled with water, too. The U.A.D. set up its facilities a few days before a festival and every day the kids and I went down to watch the dogs practice. I decided then and there I wanted my dog to be an Ultimate Air Dog, and in doing so I unwittingly made my daughter want to be an Ultimate Air Dog, too.

One of Wendell's most impressive skills---other than climbing trees (I'm not kidding)---is his ability to jump and reach a treat held about eight feet in the air. I got out the ladder and practiced his jumping in the backyard. Juniper told me that she, too, could jump and reach a treat, but her efforts fell far short. I'd hesitate to even call what she did jumping. That damn Nursery School Olympics really boosted her self-confidence to an intolerable level. I need to find some mean little rich girls from Grosse Pointe to make fun of her clothes, stat.

After a few days of practice, Saturday came and with it the Ultimate Air Dog Championships. "Are you gonna be an Ultimate Air Dog?" I said to Wendell in my best talking-to-dogs voice.

"Me, too!" shouted Juniper. I rolled my eyes.

When we got there, I realized most of the other participants were far more serious than we were. They all had t-shirts made with their dogs' names on them: "Team Kelsi" and "Air Waffles." Some of the dogs were wearing special aerodynamic outfits and several of the humans were inexplicably wearing spandex. It was kind of like hanging out with the parents at a gymnastics meet, except their kids were, you know, dogs.

But then again, so was mine.

During a jump, the human would stand at the end of a long elevated dock while a partner held their straining, anxious dog at the other end. They bashed the dog's favorite toy against the dock or twirled it around, taunting the dog with it, calling its name until the partner let go, then they tossed the toy high into the pool just as the dog had reached the end of the dock. The dog would leap magnificently fifteen or twenty feet out into the water. A crowd of onlookers had gathered and would clap for each leaping participant. The dog parents all knew each other already and enthusiastically congratulated each other's dogs after each jump. Milt Wilcox announced the events through one of those mini PA systems. It was very serious business. I was nervous.

When our turn came, I had to hand the kid and the baby off to my wife as I mounted the dock. I didn't have anyone to hold Wendell at one end, and none of the other competitors volunteered. "Sit," I said to him up on the dock while hundreds of people waited. "Stay." I could hear my child screaming hysterically as my wife dragged her over to the viewing area, "BUT I'M AN ULTIMATE AIR DOG TOO! I'M AN ULTIMATE AIR DOG, MAMA!"

I walked backwards towards the water while Wendell sat confused at the other end. Eventually I mimicked the earlier participants and bashed his favorite chew toy against the dock, and he sprinted towards it. When I tossed the toy into the water he threw his haunches against the astroturf and slid to a halt. When I gestured for him to jump he gave me a look that said, "What, are you fucking crazy?" We tried again, and the next time when I threw the toy up in the air, he jumped tenderly into the water a foot or so from the end of the dock and swam out to get it. Subsequent attempts went the same. My heart sank. My dog was no Ultimate Air Dog. The next competitor was another German Shorthaired Pointer who easily leaped seventeen feet and caught his toy mid-air. "See Wendell: why can't you be more like Champ there?"

After slinking away to find my wife and children, Wendell went up to his little sister and shook all the water off himself, as if to say, "Here Juney, I'll share some of my Ultimate Air Dog water with you."

He needn't have bothered. A few minutes later, it started to downpour, and we were stuck in it. At some point on the walk home, that moment arrived when everyone's underwear was completely wet and there was nothing more the rain could do to us: you get as defiant as Job and decide it's no longer worth running or avoiding giant puddles, and you start to almost have fun. A Detroit cop saw my wife with her stroller and stopped his cruiser to offer us a ride home. "We're almost there," she said. "But thank you!" I was barefoot. Juniper was ankle-deep in a puddle. When we got home, we all stripped and I threw Wendell in the bathtub. He shook himself off a few dozen times, splattering the tub and the shower curtain with mud.

I wrapped Juniper in a towel, held her with that cool, delicious kiss of rain still soft on our skin. I showed her Wendell in the filthy tub. "Your big brother wasn't a very good Ultimate Air Dog was he?" She shook her head. "Do you want to go in there with him?" She shook her head again. "But I thought you were a dog, too, and wet dogs always go in the bathtub."

She took a long, hard look at the inside of the tub, with its two inches of coffee-colored water, the drain clogged by clumps of trapped dog hair. "You know Pops," she said. "I was only pretending to be a dog."

"Really?" I said, and brought her downstairs to make some hot chocolate.

[thanks again go to Xenos Mesa at Xenos Designs and Graphic Vectors for the amazing illustration on this post. Also, see the handmade clothes at the etsy store he runs with his wife]

I get a lot of e-mails asking whether we've remained as rigid with our no-television policy for Juniper as we set out to be. I'm not going to write much about it. I just don't have it in me to write a post about how she flies kites and plays pick-up-sticks and whittles her own wooden toys and makes dolls out of corn husks and does all the sorts of things that children did before the advent of television. Writing about your elitist attitude towards television---no matter how sincere---is no different from writing about your elitist attitude towards anything: you can hold up your hands and claim you're just expressing your personal beliefs about breastfeeding or cloth diapers or natural childbirth or, ahem, blog advertising, but even if you attempt to drain all sanctimony from your message, you're going to piss someone off and it's your own damn fault for not keeping those self-proclaimed "personal beliefs" to yourself.

Truth be told, it's pretty easy to be an elitist about television when your kid won't sit still for it. At this age I wouldn't mind if Juniper took some interest in watching TV. Apparently it is great for occupying a child so you can take a shit without a wingman, get some housework done, or even spend some time on the internet. I wouldn't know. Once in awhile I will turn on PBS, but the only thing she'll sit still for is this show about a whiny 4-year-old French-Canadian cancer patient. I can understand why his family puts up with all the whining, considering the chemotherapy and all, but as far as I can tell all Caillou has taught Juniper is how to be a more accomplished whiner, and frankly I could do with less of that.

What I really want to write about today is how Juniper is obsessed with getting the dog to talk. Wendell has proven to be a blessedly quiet dog. He does not bark or growl, and, perhaps sensing that our household is currently experiencing a glut of it, he never, ever whines. Juniper is uneasy with this silence. She has been trying to teach him the words she learned first. "Talk Wendell!" she shouts at him. "Talk, now! Say ball!" He just sits there, wagging his tail, staring at the ball in her hand. "Wendell won't talk, dada," she says to me. "Get him to talk."

I just shrug. I won't break the news to her that she will never have a conversation with her beloved German Shorthair. Not yet. Instead, I've inflamed her hopes by going back to my old standby of televised toddler entertainment: the easily digested 2-3 minute fare on YouTube. Remembering that a simple search in YouTube has solved a half dozen dilemmas caused by Juniper's strange obsessions, I searched for "talking dogs." The search yielded this.

We have watched it many dozens of times. It never ceases to crack her up, the last dog in particular. Talking dogs, like bike-riding bears and cigar-smoking chimps, are mildly amusing at first, but it doesn't take long before you look into their sad, empty eyes and realize what depraved creatures we humans are to enjoy forcing animals to act like us. I now sit there overanalyzing the video, wondering about these women who have taught their dogs to say, " I wuv woo!" or "I want my momma!" How long did that take? What drove them to teach their pets to express such complex emotions beyond their ordinary vocal range, to articulate such words with no actual understanding behind them? What satisfaction do they get from the blank eagerness in those canine eyes, merely watching for the milk bone to be tossed their way? And don't get me started on all the people who have taught their cats to say, "I love you."

Other than YouTube, just about the only other thing I can get Juniper to watch are the dozen-or-so DV tapes of footage I took while we were living in San Francisco. I'll sit there and watch them with her, cringing at the sound of my own voice talking to her, acting like a blabbering 4-month-old is having some kind of conversation with me, then, on another tape, reading far more into guttural 14-month-old proclamations than they clearly deserved, as though I was privy to some hilarious Bruce-Willisy voiceover about drool that the mic just didn't pick up. God, what a douchebag.

[I am in the process of updating that "Anthology of Televised Toddler Entertainment" I started last summer; there is a lot of brush to clear from the Sesame Street section where videos have been removed from YouTube, but I am more concerned about adding some great new short videos that 2-5 year olds enjoy. Is there anything on YouTube your kids love to watch over and over? Let me know and I'll be sure to add it to the video page]

This past weekend, Wood had three debilitating migraines in three days. During the first, she slept at our friends' house on the other side of the state while Juniper and I walked down to their beach. The kid did the whole half-mile-or-so walk without being carried, both progress and in this case a necessity, as my arms were filled with buckets and sand shovels and towels and a frisbee for the dog and a kite for us all. We all stood together on the bluffs, dog, daughter, and dad, looking down at that endless stretch of water, down to the beach where I'd soon pick up some weird cell phone signal from another time zone. I carried Juniper down the hundreds of wooden steps to the beach, and pointed out into the silver blue horizon and said, "That's Lake Michigan, where your mom and I swam all the time when we were kids."

"The Wild Tiger farted," she said. And she had. Even the strong onshore breeze could not mask evidence supporting that declaration. I was not permitted to smile.

From its eastern shore, Lake Michigan does seem as impressively vast as any ocean in the world. Plus, it is low in sodium and has no sharks. I'd forgotten how much I missed the lake. I used to go all the time, back before it started to feel like just a bunch of creepy people lying around on sand. Last Friday we were the only ones on that desolate stretch of the beach, though you could see the silhouette of a girl in a bikini tossing a football to a guy knee-deep in the water a ways down the shore. Once set loose on the hot sand, Juniper ran straight toward and into the water, a marked improvement over her performance one year ago in Santa Cruz, though she may still wear the same swimsuit. She did not shiver this year, or cry. She laughed with this weird laugh she reserves for new experiences that she finds surprisingly pleasant, and I was proud of her. Juniper has been a very skeptical child. She is extremely deliberate. I followed her along that part of the beach where the waves just reach being that cheesy dad from an old car or coffee commercial who's all proud of his kid growing up a bit, the little squirt.

Then the dog disappears.

I scan the beach into the distance, but Juniper is the first to see him: he's about thirty yards out into the water, and once I see his little seal-pup head all the way out there, I think, "Well, Wendell was a good dog while he lasted."

Five, ten minutes pass. He's further out there, but swimming north along the shore now. I figure with the way he is going, he'll either drown or reach Milwaukee early the next morning. I can't do anything to save him. I'm not David Hasselhoff---not even the earthbound drunk sloppy-burger-eating Hasselhoff. Am I actually capable of rescuing something? Could I trust Juniper to stay on the shore? She laughs again with that weird laugh, watching him dogpaddle out to sea, no idea that I'm standing there holding her hand and figuring that her dog is probably going to die. She won't be laughing when he doesn't come back, I think, and toss my shirt off into the dry sand. Scooping up Juniper while slowly walking out into the water, I scream the dog's name, assuming his crazy dog brain is all panicked and he's swimming in circles not knowing the way to shore. Haven't I read in books about dogs drowning themselves like that? Almost instantly I am in water up to my armpits, not twenty feet off shore. Juniper is wet and she just wants to swim around. I hold her tight, ready to turn back, but heading out just a little further, calling to him, and suddenly my knees are back in the breeze. It's a sandbar, and as I get closer and closer to the dog I realize he's been on this sandbar the entire time, basically walking around in two and a half feet of water fifty or sixty yards offshore with just his head visible above the water. He walked over to me and smelled me for a second then walked away again. We swam out there for almost an hour. It was fun. When we got back to the place where we'd thrown all our stuff, the dog still had enough energy to sprint up and down the shore and spend the next forty minutes harassing me with the pieces of driftwood and other detritus that he wanted me to throw for him. I would close my eyes for a minute and he'd cover me with twelve chewed-up twigs and a tampon applicator he'd found on the beach. And to think I ever for a split second considered diving into that water to rescue his sorry wet ass.

It used to kind of annoy me when people would tell me that their pets were their children. I would be wrangling the baby at a barbecue and get introduced to someone who would show me a picture of "their baby"--- a boxer or a basset hound --- and I always wanted to say, "The only way that gets to count as your baby is if I can put my daughter in a crate for eight hours with a bowl of kibble while my wife and I spend the evening getting wasted at the Arcade Fire show."

I get uncomfortable encountering women pushing pugs in $800 strollers. It also used to bother me when couples would tell me they were getting a dog as "practice" for raising a kid.

But now that I am a dog owner, I have greater sympathy for those who have agreed to share their homes with a canine. In some ways, having a dog isn't that different from having a baby. Consider shit. After Juniper was born, it felt like I was wrist deep in feces about half of the time. Shit was no longer something that easily slipped away up through the plumbing after a simple flush: suddenly it was something that oozed and leaked; it lurked in tightly-packed bundles at the bottom of the diaper decor; it hid behind the mysterious crags and folds of infant genitalia; it came in colors I had never seen, in consistencies that seemed to defy conventional earthly viscosities. It was, in a word, every-fucking-where.

Now that I have a dog, I can see that it is good way to acclimate oneself to loads of crap. Wendell, our dog, is a real shitter. He craps every time we take him for a walk, and that's four or five times a day. He has, on occasion, even pooped on our parquet floors. I have to say that having a lil' crapper was really good practice for having a dog. I haven't gagged or retched once now that I have experienced the plight of the urban dog owner: bending over and picking up the steaming pile of poo that has just oozed out of a dog's anus. It's not just humiliating, it's humbling in the same sort of way that parenthood can be. This is the cost of taking on the responsibility of something that doesn't know any better. Sometimes you just end up with a little bit of turd on your index finger.

When I was about 7 months pregnant with Juniper, Dutch had a great idea. He proposed it to me exactly like this:

"We should get a puppy when your maternity leave starts! You're going to be home for a few months with the baby anyway, so it's the perfect time to get a puppy. It'll be awesome!"

I'm not sure exactly how I responded, but I'm pretty sure I tossed in plenty of shock, a smidge of outrage, and a whole helping of incredulity that my husband could have temporarily lost such a grip on his goddamn sanity.

During the last two months of my pregnancy, whenever anyone asked me how Dutch was doing, and was he ready to be a dad, I told this story as an example of how he just "didn't get it" to people who wanted to hear about how he didn't get it. Obviously, we never seriously considered getting a dog at that time. Instead, I interpreted the fact that he could even suggest something so ridiculous to mean that my worst nightmare was about to come true. I pictured myself sitting on the couch, slowly going crazy, struggling to nurse a newborn for at least 22 hours a day, with Dutch at his office completely unsympathetic and clueless about what life was like for me at home.

That's not what happened, of course. After Juniper was born, Dutch took all the paternity leave his firm offered, and he was at home more days than he was in the office for the first few months of her life. He fought with me over the privilege of holding her and changing her diapers, and he took sole responsibility for putting her to sleep at night -- the most difficult chore we faced -- so that I could have a break and watch Season 5 of American Idol in peace.

Now I tell the ill-advised puppy-proposal story for a different reason: to explain how badly Dutch has wanted a dog.

When we were first friends and freshmen in college, nearly 11 years ago, I knew that Dutch liked me when he dragged me down the parking lot outside of our dorm to meet his parent's new puppy, a tiny wiggling dalmation. It was also the first time I met his parents, but that part was no big deal. The dog was who he was excited to show me.

When Dutch and I were first dating, his mom whispered a story to me about him while he was out of the room. She told me that when she and his father had taken his first dog to the vet to put her to sleep, and left Dutch home with his sister, they'd come home to find him missing. They followed his footprints in the two-foot deep snow and eventually found him sitting in the woods crying.

Somewhere in the boxes of college stuff I have in our basement, there's a picture of a 20 year-old Dutch wearing puma sneakers with a huge smile on his soft, stubble free cheeks crouching down and petting a strange black lab. We met the dog while we were visiting a castle in Ireland when we lived there. Dutch played with that dog for an hour.

Because of stuff like that, I always knew that we'd have a dog. I even promised Dutch that when Juniper learned to say the word "dog" that we'd get one. Though he tried to argue that her panting at the sight of a strange canine counted when she was eleven months old, I disagreed. Now she's able to identify specific breeds, so I guess I broke that promise, but until now, until this very week, it wasn't the right time. This morning, I tried to call Dutch but his line was busy, and he wasn't picking up the call waiting. "I'm sorry about that," he apologized later. "I was talking to my dad. He was crying. He had Dolly put to sleep early this morning." Dolly was the dalmation Dutch introduced me to when we were still in our teens. This thing is in Dutch's blood.

Despite how badly Dutch has wanted and needed a dog in his life for as long as I've known him, he's still nervous that now isn't the right time. He's still afraid of the dog hair, and he's even more scared that the dog will be something that I resent. He overheard me tell my mother on the phone that "I'm not a dog person," and he's worried that I don't really to want to have Wendell around.

But he's wrong. I'm not a dog person only because I've never had the privilege of living with one before. I haven't seen Dutch so excited -- and so nervous -- since Juniper was born, and that alone is enough to make me excited.

Welcome to our family, Wendell. I'm glad to have you.

The last post being a fine example of my patented windbaggery, I am going to keep this short and sweet: we went and got ourselves a dog. I would like to introduce Wendell. At the shelter they called him "Buddy." He is a ten-month-old German shorthaired pointer, and the shelter people think he was dumped on the streets and vacant lots of Detroit by a hunter from the suburbs because he wasn't a very good hunter. Wendell is supposedly the old-German word for "wanderer." He is wonderful with Juniper. He is letting her cover him in blankets and wipe his "owies" with baby wipes on the floor right now. At two, she is clearly smarter than he is. He pooped on the floor of my office yesterday while I was putting her down for a nap, which bothered me far less than I would have thought. My tolerance for feces is exceptionally high these days.

In the spirit of keeping this brief, I will leave you with these two things: (1) in the future, I promise not to write too much about the dog; (2) I may break that promise if the hijinks of pottytraining two creatures under one roof proves moderately entertaining.

I grew up with dogs. I haven't lived with one since I left my parents' house at eighteen. I can't tell you how amazing it is to have a dog put his head on my knees and look up at me and to know that he is mine. Now I need to go vacuum up the dog hairs before Wood gets home from work.