Vacation

One of the hardest things for me to master as a single mom has been vacationing. Not just the epic packing battles with two little girls who only want to bring 3 swim suits and 5 sundresses even when it's a snow trip, but the logistics of traveling alone with two small kids, and frequently a dog as well: all of those contingency plans and nerve-wracking crowded airports or hopes that the car doesn't break down en route to some hours-away destination.

Last summer was my first time driving to our family's cabin, 4.5 hours away, through hot valley towns and up into the Sierras, finishing with a 45 minute trek along a rutted dirt logging road, with two girls and a dog. There were bathroom breaks, dog water breaks, snack breaks, general runaround breaks for two girls who could only be happily confined to their hot pink car seats for so long. I stressed about the the possibility of having car issues, about the dog overheating in the car as I ran the girls into the next rest stop, about getting too tired and fed up with the back seat fighting and having no one to help me out.

I caravanned with some family friends that first time up, just in case anything went awry, and during the long drive I realized something invaluable: I had it down. This single-motherhood thing had already become second-nature to me. The girls had a bin of books and games wedged between their car seats that kept them busy for much of the time. We blasted music and sang together when we needed to perk up. I had a mini-cooler of food and drinks on the passenger seat, full of pre-cut, single-serve portions I'd readied the night before. I had a clear view of the dog sleeping on top of our pile of suitcases in the back, and could see when he was getting restless. When we had to stop in hot towns I blasted the A/C to cool off the car, then found a shady parking spot and made a game out of rushing the girls off to the bathroom and back to the car as quickly as possible. I lounged on random lawns outside fast food restaurants while the dog trotted around and the girls picked dandelions. I let go of my usual travel timetable, any expectations, and relaxed. And it was fine.

That's not to say I haven't had any travel or vacation hiccups in my year of doing it solo. We've been stranded with a dead car battery. We've had throwing up children traveling with borrowed bowls on their laps in the car. We've had the dog get into some sort of insect nest and end up with a face swollen with three baseball-size lumps and had to rush him to the nearest emergency vet. We've had a cross-country flight just days after Peanut fell and knocked out her front tooth and loosened up a handful of others, juggling her all-liquid diet on an airline in this no-liquids-through-security era. And we've made it through it all. And got some good stories to boot.

So today I'm packing up for our first big trip of the season. I have lists of all of the clothes, food, meds, toys, and dog supplies I will need. And I have the confidence, that even if some disaster befalls us mid-route, we'll get through it, we'll make the best of it, and we'll still have a good time.

And if it's really bad, I'll end up with a great story out of it.

Hiking

Before kids, hubby and I used to spend a lot of time hiking. After we got our dog, the always energetic vizsla, we spent even more time hiking, even opting for cold, pouring down rain hikes, where we’d all end up soaked and mud-covered, anything to keep ourselves active and wear out the dog. When he was just a hyperactive puppy, all long floppy ears and gangly legs, we used to hike him for so long that at some point he’d just give up, maybe after seven or eight miles, and we’d have to carry him the rest of the way. As he matured, covering three miles to every one mile we hiked, with his need to explore every trail, stream, hillside, and meadow we passed, we kept adding more distance to our outings to end up with the same quiet, tired dog at the end of the day.

After having kids we kept up modified versions of these hikes, but with babies in Bjorns, then backpacks, then jogging strollers, with diaper changes and feedings to factor in, we weren’t able to cover the same amount of ground, and we had to be more selective about the weather we were going to expose our kids to. This past year, with neither child able to hike far, and both refusing to ride in a stroller, the poor dog has hardly been on any long-distance hikes at all. I have to admit, it’s been unfair to him, to set up this expectation that every weekend he’ll be hiked to exhaustion, then suddenly scrap the routine.

Yesterday, I decided to try a hike alone with the two girls and the dog. I feel a little wary of going without hubby, and minding the dog off-leash in a large area full of grazing cows while monitoring the girls as they totter along bumpy, hilly paths, but they’ve both recently had growth spurts, and their long legs gave me hope that maybe they’re finally ready for some real hiking. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the outing. The dog roamed and explored far and wide, encountering several other off-leash dogs to play with, including two other vizslas. The girls basically ran the entire time, their new longer legs handling the uneven terrain like pros. We went full out for an hour, and when Peanut started slowing down, I asked if she needed me to carry her the last stretch back to the car. Without a word she took off running again, quickly catching up to her sister. It was the first hike I’ve taken since having children where I never carried a child or had to push one along.

With bad weather on its way, we might not have ideal conditions for a lot of these outings, but I’m glad to know that when time and weather allow, we’re all equally game for it.

Dog Sitting

For the next ten days, we’re dog sitting one of our dog’s littermates. Now, just about the only thing more excited than a vizsla is two vizslas, so it stands to be an energetic and chaotic week and a half. The girls are looking forward to the dog chaos, as anything new and different holds some special allure at this age.

We’ve kept our dog’s big strong brother on several occasions now, so we’re all old friends and have a system down. First there’s the competitive feeding for the pair, where they race to finish their food just in time to race over and check their brother’s just-emptied bowl. Then there’s the trick of settling them down to sleep at night, instead of staying awake all night playing, waking the entire house with their high-flying antics and crashes into furniture—crate training is a must for any dog owner. And of course it’ll be great to see our dog so exhausted from playing all day every day that I won’t have to feel guilty for not walking him more often.

Really, the only member of the household who won’t be thrilled to see our dog’s brother return is the cat. But thanks to a run-in with our now-gone cat Alley, the 8-pounder who took on this rambunctious 55-pound vizsla visitor and left him with a Zorro-like tattoo across his chest, he has a healthy respect for (okay, call it fear of) cats.

So, let the wild dog-rumpus begin…

Dog TV

The dog has found something in a wood pile out back, something small and quiet that we’ve never seen, but can see evidence of in the tiny burrows beneath the pile of twigs we cut off our mulberry tree in vain efforts to keep it from taking over then entire deck with its long, low-slung branches. We have a variety of wildlife around us, from the horses that live up on the hill behind us, to a variety of hawks, smaller birds, and squirrels that like our maple tree, to nightly visitors of raccoons, opossum, the occasional skunk, and, for one horrible summer, these tree-scaling rats that would scurry up the fence after dark.

Whatever this current resident is, we’re guessing a vole, it has captivated our dog like no other creature. He’ll stand out back, ears pricked forward, tail wagging, just studying this small pile of tree limbs. He never barks or digs at it, seeming content just to watch, sometimes for hours. Our dog, a Vizsla (so not a calm breed by anyone’s standards), will be 6 in October, and he seems to be mellowing out ever so slightly now. He can still go pretty nuts when we have company, jumping and wriggling so exuberantly that you’d think he might squirm right out of his skin, but after such an episode of excitement, he’ll nap for a good hour to recover. So it’s only recently that he could muster the kind of focus he seems to be showing the wood pile.

Personally, I like the new guest. I gave up on my vegetable garden years ago, when all of our nightly visitors stripped my plants clean each day, so the vole can have the planter box he’s living in. And I like how his presence is keeping me from tripping over the dog all day. I get a little worried during heat waves, when the dog is outside panting like mad in 105 degree weather, refusing to abandon his newfound entertainment to come in and cool off. But who am I to deny him his favorite show?

Mother Dove

There is a mother Mourning Dove who built a nest on our back fence. I figure she’s either pretty brave or pretty stubborn to choose a spot so close to a 50-pound-dog’s primary hangout, but maybe the dog has offered her some protection, as he has no particular issue with birds, but will chase squirrels, cats, raccoons, and opossums relentlessly. I realize how lucky we are that he has never met a skunk back there. I also figure it’s just a matter of time until he does.

Anyway, the dove’s fledgling has now emerged from the nest: a smaller, scragglier version of its mother. When we see them out there together, the mother carefully feeding her offspring, we close off the dog door so they can carry out this ritual in peace, and we call the girls to come watch. They’ve been fascinated by this mother-child relationship, from wanting to understand what and how she’s feeding her baby, to wanting to investigate the trails of bird poop that now decorate the fence and many parts of the back yard.

These little lessons with the girls are some of my favorite moments with them. Their curiosity has no limits, and their fascination is contagious. Where before, I would’ve spent a few minutes each day glancing out the back window to see if the birds were around, I now spend a decent part of each day kneeling between my girls and discussing every aspect of bird behavior. These are the moments when you understand the real reason for having kids. It isn’t about passing along the family name, or the family genes, or having someone to care for you when you’re old. It’s about all of the valuable little lessons they have to teach you along the way.

A Dog's Life

I think every house with small children should have a family dog. Not just because of the romantic notions left over from years of watching Lassie, about kids bonding so well with pets or being protected by them, although there’s that, too. Mostly, it’s the clean-up crew that dogs provide that I don’t think I could live without.

We got our dog a year before having our first child. He was our test-run on parenting, and I think we did pretty well with him. He was easy to crate train and never showed any anxiety because of the training. He quickly learned that any food for him would be in his bowl, and no food outside his dog dish was up for grabs. He has never growled or snapped at anyone. He sits obediently outside the room while we cook and eat dinner, waiting to be invited in when we are finished.

When our first daughter came home from the hospital, the dog was curious but never jealous, and readily accepted her as part of the family pack. When she became a toddler, leaving trails of cheerios throughout the house, and a vast array of food around her high chair after each feeding (which it was his job to clean up), she became his favorite person on the planet. Sure, it undid some of that careful training, and now when he finds a half-eaten bagel on the coffee table, he’ll glance at me as if to ask “May I?” where before he never would’ve considered it. And we had to spend a good chunk of time training the kids not to feed him all the food they’d rejected (and my kids reject a lot of food), but now we’ve got a nice balance going.

If it weren’t for the dog, I’d spend an awful lot of time on my hands and knees, mopping up spills or collecting bits of food that were too sticky for the vacuum. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched him carefully devour every stray grain of rice from inside a high chair, or meticulously clean spilled milk from the floor, and been grateful that I had a little help keeping up with these expert mess-makers.

Dirty Cat

At the height of our menagerie, we had three cats and one dog. Even in a 2000+ square foot house, it was crowded. Once we threw two kids into the mix, well, let’s just say that sad as I was to lose one of the cats to cancer, it was nice to be down to only two litter boxes to police. Two months ago we had to put down another beloved cat. That loss was harder, since our kids were older and the 4-year-old was very bonded with her. It turned out to be a nice lesson in life and death for her, and a nice lesson in children’s pragmatism for me. When I finally broke her the tearful news that our sweet Alley was too sick and had died, she pondered this briefly, then said, “But we still have the dirty cat?” (her affectionate nickname for our cat Fish). “Yes,” I assured her. She nodded, “Okay. Can I have a snack?”

So we’re now down to one cat and one dog. The dog is a vizsla, which, if any of you are familiar with the breed, means that at five years old he only sometimes seems like he’s going to burst out of his skin from the sheer excitement of living. The remaining cat is now fifteen and remarkably spry and healthy. He has one flaw that makes him hard to live with, and that earned him that very sweet nickname “dirty cat.” He poops. Everywhere. This began in rebellion a few weeks after our first child was born. He eventually broke the habit, and went back to using the litter box when she was a few months old. Then a year later we had a second child, and he’s never gone back.

We’ve tried a variety of anti-anxiety meds that made him jittery, snoozy, and spacey, but none of them did a thing to curb the poop-everywhere habit. I looked into cat diapers, but decided that having two kids plus one cat in diapers would be more bottom-wiping than I could handle. At some point I resorted to covering the living room floor with newspapers, which he seemed to enjoy, then reduced the amount of newspaper gradually. Now the only newspaper is next to the litter box. Usually, he poops on the paper, folds it carefully over on itself, pees in the litter box, and crawls back inside the couch to snooze his day away. Usually.

I'm in no rush to get rid of the dirty cat, trying as he is. We've been together for 15 years now, which makes this the longest non-family relationship I've had. But on that sad day when he leaves this world, I plan to pack up the litter boxes for a while, and enjoy living in a one-pet household.