How Our Dog Has Prepared Us For A Kid

Before you laugh, hear me out. We don't know what kind of kid we're going to get - could be a miracle baby who self soothes and sleeps through the night, or could be the spawn of Satan...only time will tell. Also, you don't understand how neurotic our dog is. Let me paint a little picture for you:

 

Keeping Us Up At Night:

 

Saturday nights are pretty tame in our house, seeing as how Sunday mornings come very early (with a very busy schedule) for Mr. Sloan. We try our best to be in bed at a reasonable time, especially this past week since Ryan was several days into fighting a nasty cold. Aside from me being up and down quite a bit and Ryan coughing up a lung, our slumber was pretty typical until 2am. At 2am, Mother Nature decided to give us a crash course in what a night with a baby could be like.

 

Being a product of Arizona, I don't do storms. They scare me, and I especially don't like them when it's dark outside. People from the Midwest think that I am exaggerating when I say that at the first crack of thunder or news alert about a watch, I gather up my loved ones and head straight to the basement, where we have several gallons of water, canned goods, blankets, folding lawn chairs, dog food, flashlights, phone chargers, batteries, and a first aid kit. I assure you, I am not exaggerating.

 

In the age old debate of nature v. nurture, Mia is also terrified of storms, but we are not sure if it's due to me teaching her to be scared, or if it's because of her own personal brand of crazy. Back to Saturday night/Sunday morning at 2am, a crack of lightning and a rumble of thunder directly over our house awoke both Mia and I. She immediately came flying off of her bed and started pacing around our bed to see if either of us were awake. Because we are terrible people, when we don't want to get up with her, we play dead. No blinking or rolling or movement of any kind usually rescinds her recon mission and she takes herself back to bed. In a storm, though, no amount of pretending to be lifeless will squelch her fear. Because he's a better person than I am, Ryan dragged his sick self out of bed to put Mia back in hers, cover her up (we know...), and tell her goodnight. That lasted about six seconds, until another round of lightning reared its ugly head. Repeat the above scenario no less than 11 times, and that brought us to 2:45am.

 

Seeing that she wasn't going to stay in bed until the storm had passed, and realizing that we were entangled below the world's slowest moving storm, I cut our losses and took Mia and my comforter into the living room. Our dog has laid claim to just about every blanket in our house, and we have just given up and let her have them. However, she will literally leave her compound of anywhere between four and nine blankets (depending on the day), to lie on a 2" corner of one of our blankets that is dangling on the floor. Using this to my advantage, I cut out the middle man and just settled in on the floor, draped the comforter over myself, offered about 1/3 of my blanket to her, and settled in for a sleepless rest of the night. At 5:30am, I woke up freezing, only to realize that Mia had the entire queen size comforter wrapped under, around, and over herself. She was sleeping soundly, while I was shivering on a rock hard floor...by myself.

Having A Puke-y Floor Licker:

 

In fairness, she is a dog, so I should expect for her to lick the floor...and the trash can...and her own butt. What I did not expect was the amount of vomit I would be cleaning up when we brought Mia into our family. Not only does she vomit all the time, but she does it in the least convenient places. We have mostly trained her to stay off of the carpet, but her new trick is to run into the very back corner of her kennel before heaving. Which means that I, at 4.5+ months pregnant and always in a dress, must crawl into her kennel to clean, sanitize, and dry the tray...avert your eyes unless you want them burned or clawed out Oedipus style. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say, that there is no earthly way that a tiny human could puke more than our dog.

 

Acting Out For Attention:

 

In Mia's defense, we haven't really given her much attention lately. Between being puke-y myself and Ryan fighting an epically insurmountable cold, she's heard a lot of "Not now/go lie down/we're tired." Because she is a perfect, albeit gross, angel of a dog, she listens. And each time she's told to do so, she retreats to our her blanket fort and patiently waits for one of us to drag ourselves off of the couch.

 

Today, she took matters into her own paws and bit the handle off of a clothes hanger (Before the basket of clean clothes gets put away, I hang my dresses on hangers and lay them across the top of the basket) and played Frisbee with herself. Once I realized what she had done, I took it away from her, scolded her, and told Ryan about her misbehavior. His response? Immediate, guttural laughter. The verdict is in: I'm the bad cop. I felt guilty after I realized how little we had played with her this week, so I let her have the last of my ice cream bar...and 25 minutes later, cleaned up more dog puke.