Round 2! (Just Like Round 1 with Less Rain and Better Food)

I took Pumpkin camping this past week-end. My friend, Jill, and her 5yo daughter, Abbey, joined us for our second annual trip to a spot all of 45 minutes out of the city. We figured that it was close enough that if things really started to suck, we could just head back home and call a babysitter to save us. This option did not have to be exercised as the week-end was a success!

Some of the highlights included:

Corn pops and coffee!!!

Visiting a nearby playground where both girls spent energy climbing up and sliding down a pole. This would count as a failure on behalf of both dads, who's job it is to keep our daughters off the pole. Nice going guys!

Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches! Nothing better than bacon in the woods. Mmmmmm....

Beach time!

Washing both cars with wet wipes, leaving streaks galore, but deemed an acceptable, time-filling activity for the girls to engage in while the mommies enjoyed a late afternoon fire.

Not bathing, grooming, or deodorizing for 48 hours straight! We did jump in the lake though. That counts, right? By Sunday morning, we mommies opted for hats instead of allowing our scraggly, Afro hair to fly free any longer. Seeing her mom don a hat caused Abbey to burst into tears. When asked why the hat upset her, Abbey replied, "Because you just look so ugly, mommy!"

Jill and I sitting up late by the fire having drinks and munchies, while the conversation slowly degraded. "Hee hee, Yurt! YUUUURRRRT!"

And the piece de resistance... my kettle portrait!

Just Give Us Ugly Candy From Now On

A few months ago, Pumpkin was given a large, chocolate Easter dog, which she tasted, but then deemed too cute to eat. She wanted to keep it instead. Grrrreeaaat. More crap in my house. Given that I fully intended to throw out the chocolate dog at the first opportunity, I implemented my usual system: Hide it for a fixed amount of time, then toss it when I am certain that it has been forgotten about. This is how I rid my life of Happy Meal toys and mounds of Pumpkin's art work, so I did the same with the chocolate dog.

I hid the chocolate dog well enough that I completely forgot about it myself. However, recently a visiting friend of mine was desperate for a junk food fix and stumbled across the chocolate dog, which I gave her permission to eat. She smashed it up, and satisfied her craving, storing the leftovers in a container in one of my kitchen cupboards.

Today while Pumpkin was instructing my mom on where to find a good snack, Pumpkin chose the cupboard where the smashed dog was hiding. It isn't a usual snack cupboard for Pumpkin, but I think she is now on to the fact that the huz and I have our own guilty pleasures tucked away in various compartments in the kitchen, and she wanted to check around.

Needless to say, Pumpkin was mortified with what she found. The waterworks turned on full force as she bawled, shouting at me for letting this happen to her dog. She was inconsolable.

I would have felt absolutely terrible about all this if it weren't for one fact. Between tearful episodes of Pumpkin mourning the death of her beloved chocolate dog, who was so cute, and is now gone forever, she was stuffing her face with its remnants!

I wonder if animals who eat their young ever get this emotional?

But the Dog Came Back the Very Next Day...

When I was 17, my mom went away for a week-end, leaving me in charge of the house while she was gone. She knew that I was going to have my friends over for a drink or twenty, but she trusted me well enough to keep it under control.

Overall I was a trustworthy teenager, but on that Sunday morning after a night of 'debauchery' with my friends, I opened the front door to find our family dog on the porch, waiting to be let in after a night of frolicking and who knows what else. Boy was he dirty! I have no idea how he got out, but I was ever so thankful that he decided to stay close to home. I only confessed this to my mom about ten years ago. I figured that I was too old to get grounded by that time.

Yesterday, Pumpkin couldn't find her favourite stuffed dog. I gave the house a pretty good once over in search of it, but it didn't turn up. I can usually find anything, so I became concerned that she dropped it somewhere in her travels, and that it was gone for good.

This morning when I opened the door to take Pumpkin to camp, we looked down at the front step, and there was her stuffed dog, waiting to come in! I don't know how it got out or how it found it's way back, but I was once again very grateful for yet another locked out dog staying close to home.

I immediately turned to the huz to recount the story of my mom's dog that I locked out all those years ago. He laughed, but there was this unspoken overtone in his demeanor that let me know that it wouldn't be funny if I had done that to his dog. Whatever. I'm not a drunk teenager anymore, so why even think about it. Right?

Later this very same day, after poking my head out the front door to grab the mail, I found myself experiencing the weirdest sensation of not being followed by my shadow dog, Lucky. It was the absence of tripping over her while I puttered around the house that alerted me to something being off. I called out her name, but she was a no-show.

'When I grabbed the mail???', I wondered, as I ran to the front door. Guess who I found on the front step when I opened the door?