A Surprisingly Sane Blog

By popular request, I took some pictures of my silly dogs.  You probably can’t tell from these pictures (since they roll around in dirt all day), but they’re actually white.  Like, puff ball white.

They are mostly Great Pyrenees with just a drop of Anatolian Shepherd.  That little drop of Shepherd makes them thismuchless dumb, and their jowls just a tad less drooly.

I have to warn you- these pictures don’t do their size justice.  They are huge, the biggest dogs on the block.  Very tall and lanky, just like their owners.  But they are also incredibly gentle and cautious.  Except for Bella sometimes.  She thinks she’s a lap dog if I sit down next to her.

While I frequently get irritated with them, they are, in fact, the best dogs ever.  They are naturally the sweetest people-pleasers you will ever meet.  Wonderful with the kids.  Oh, and they keep people from buying the house next door, and they chase the stray cats off of my property.

Their 3-month-old puppy pictures are the cutest things ever.  Bella is the perky, fluffy-stuffed-animal-looking one… and Balou’s the one who doesn’t give a fuck that the camera is aimed at him.  They still are that way today, three-and-a-half years later.  Behold, their baby picture:

All together now: “AWWWWWWWW”.  I know, they are freaking adorable.

Now here’s a sort-of-funny little story about what a weenie I can be sometimes.  Yesterday, when I went outside to snap their picture and they were attacking me with puppy love licks with their dinosaur tongues, I noticed this tan lump next to Balou’s eyebrow.

Upon further examination, I realized it was this HUGE, bloated-up tick!  Aghh!  I wanted to pick the motherfucking spawn of Satan off of him, but I was so repulsed by the memories that flooded through my mind of childhood days spent picking ticks off my mom’s old black lab that I simply couldn’t do it.  Now I know why it was my sister and I who got stuck with tick-duty.  My parents  probably just couldn’t stomach it, and we were too young and stupid to know we could refuse.

So poor Balou had that blood-sucking vampire stuck to him for another half-hour while I pondered how to rid him of the damn thing without getting anywhere near it… Until, that is, James finally came home.

Ah, the true reason I love that man.  He’s not afraid to pick ticks off my dogs and can can handle the sickening pop! from under his shoe without retching when he stomps on them.

While I will spare you a picture of the tick smashed on the patio, you simply must see their puppy-butt picture.  Notice how Bella’s tail has short fur on it?  Yeah… that’s because the groomer had to shave her ass and tail back in January.  It was, er, really matted.

You can’t tell from this picture, but our pool is comparable to a swamp.  That’s because I asked James to get our Creepy fixed before winter, but he never did.  This has happened three years in a row, and next month I’ll be gloating “I told you so” while James is dripping sweat like an evaporative cooler trying to loosen the muck and dead bugs from the bottom of the pool in 100-degree-heat on a Saturday morning.  It will take two months and several shocks to get the water clear.  And then I’ll be able to swim in it a whopping three times before it gets too cold.  Then next winter, the whole thing will happen again.  Unless I take over getting the Creepy fixed.

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m clearly in desperate need of my daily dose of Prozac.  And my hair is a frizzy mess.  At least Bella is cute, right?

Bella showing April some love.  Yes, I let my dog clean my kids’ noses for them.  So shoot me.

And that hunky guy with a gorgeous ponytail holding that crazy-haired baby?  Yeah, that’s my sexy-ass husband.

The one I jumped in the middle of the night when he was too exhausted to fight me off.

And then I left him panting for more.

Ah, good times.

Current Mood: Cool

Don’t open my freezer, okay?

You don’t want to dig around in there, trust me.

I mean, at first glance, it looks normal.  Frozen veggies, chicken, ground turkey, berries for smoothies, black bananas that are begging to be morphed into banana-nut bread, unidentifiable objects crusted over with ice that should have been in the trash a year ago.

But then there’s this double-ziplock-freezer-bagged dark red thing.

At first glance, you’d probably think it’s a slab of frozen steak or something.

Except we don’t eat red meat.

Nope, it’s definitely not a piece of dead cow.  Or sheep.  Or the retarded driver with one functioning brain cell who pissed me off three days ago.

It’s April’s wacky, double-lobed placenta, complete with the umbilical cord still attached.

To be honest, I forget it’s there most of the time.  But then every once in awhile, I’ll be searching for a hidden bag of frozen asparagus or something, and I’ll grab it thinking what’s this?

Oh yeah!  It’s that placenta!  And I feel compelled to smile at the pure morbidity of this bizarre truth: there really is a placenta in my freezer.

And then I think… wasn’t I supposed to plant a tree and bury this under it?

…

Um, yeah, that’s what my midwife said we should do, but we haven’t yet.

You wanna know why?

…

To be honest, I kind of like running into that frozen lump of human tissue that nourished my little peanut during her nine-month lodging behind my ribs while pressing on my bladder and spleen.  It sounds disgusting, but seeing it every once in awhile brings back the fond memories of my homebirth.  That incredible experience of bringing my amazing little goober into this world in the comfort of my own living room surrounded by three seriously cool people- James, my midwife, and my nurse.

And to take that honesty a step further during this (utterly disturbing) confession that I have a placenta taking up space in my freezer, my reluctance to bury it also has to do with where to bury it.

I don’t want to settle down here.  I don’t want to be stuck in this place forever.  Burying it here seems to symbolize that I have given up my fight to leave somehow.

One of these days, when we’ve moved to a city that I feel at home in, I’ll probably plant that tree.

You know, if I can stand to part with it by then.

Or maybe I’ll just give to April as a wedding present.

Current Mood: Alarmed