So to speak. When he’s sleepy, he pulls his paw up to his face and licks the side of it with tiny little licks until he falls asleep. It’s really hard to capture his wee baby tongue with the camera, but that’s what he’s doing in this picture.

It’s cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

I came in to find Mini curled up in her dad’s recliner and Taz slumped on the couch. They’re both sulking and want nothing to do with each other or with me.

Sometimes they’re worse than the cats.

I can’t believe it’s been that long! This photo was taken the weekend we brought her home in May of 2008:

She was so freakin’ cute, wasn’t she? Even cuter than Taz, maybe. So why did we start keeping her short? Besides the fact she prefers it, there’s this photo of what would happen to Mini at camp…

Happy birthday to my pretty princess!

He’s playful and loves to bomb around with the Short Kid, who’s really looking forward to taking him to camp this year. He has high hopes Taz will play ball and play fetch and, in general, behave like a dog, whereas Mini curls up on my lap in the lounge chair.

Yay, right?

So, in the course of conversation with my awesome family members who are tentatively prepared to babysit Taz and Mini while we’re in Anaheim this summer, I was asked: “Taz will be housebroken by then, right?”

Um. Well. We hope so?

In the course of the morning schedule and my work day, we do fine. The dogs curl up and nap most of the day, so when Taz jumps off the couch and stretches, it’s time to go out. It’s once school’s out and the weekends we have issues. We fully grasp it’s more us than him—when our attention’s scattered, taking him out gets overlooked.

I have to come up with a way for him to signal. Mini scratches at the (steel) door when she needs to go out and Taz will go and sit next to her and wait for me to stop yelling “Hold on, Mini! Just one more sentence!” I did, one time, spot Taz scratching at the door, but only because I happened to be walking into the kitchen. His little feet make no noise, so it does no good and I’ve never seen him do it again.

I’ve heard some people use bells. Not sure if that’s bells hanging from the doorknobs, which would amuse my cats to the point I’d probably start ignoring it, or the little “ring bell for service” bells. I saw a little dog use one of those on AFV.

I’m totally open to suggestions. He’s a wicked smart dog and he knows to go potty when we go out. We just haven’t come up with a way for him to tell us he needs to go out. Anybody have a system, like a bell or whatnot, that’s worked for a dog who can’t make scratching noises? Help?

Today was Jinx’s turn. She wanted something from me and was determined to stare at me until I figured it out. (If you guessed litterbox, you guessed right.)

Thanks to snow and ice falling off the roof, which she sees as a sign the sky is falling (it is pretty loud), she spends a lot of time under the coffee table.

If I do convince her to ignore the impending Armageddon and sit with me, she refuses to look at the camera.

And let’s just say Taz isn’t all that helpful.

Though I do love Mini’s expression in that last picture all to bits, I’m determined to get a “birthday portrait” before her birthday—one worthy of Mommy’s Pretty, Pretty Princess. (Yes, I am that frou-frou dog owner.) (No pink sparkly outfits, though, and I don’t carry her around Walmart in a little tote, so I’m not too far gone.) (Yet.)

I do not think that George Washington was a good leader for a few different reasons. On page 216 his soldiers were dying, and he sat there on his horse, watching, while the rest of his men fought back at the camp and died! Also, on page 210, while his men climbed ashore, bloody, soaked, and cold, he stood there draped in a cloack, basically “living the good life”. Another thing is that if he hadn’t made those plans, they wouldn’t have died! Finally, those men were in pain, and [he] didn’t stop to give them a break. Don’t you think he wasn’t a good leader for those reasons?

And the teacher’s note:

An interesting opinion for sure! It is well supported.

It’s obvious the short kid shares my love of the comma, though I’m totally blaming the exclamation points on his father’s side of the family.

And I’m pleased to report he got full marks for this assignment. We’ve had great luck over the years with teachers who let kids buck the party line if they fulfill the technical requirements of the assignment and can back it up. Whether it’s history, politics or anything else, we love a rowdy debate at home and we’ve raised our boys to not blindly drink anybody’s Kool-Aid, even the flavors we serve, so they could have run into trouble with a rigid teacher. Luckily, with the exception of one (and she was just dim-witted, not rigid), we’ve had great teachers every year, and with a high school junior and a fifth-grader, that’s a lot of teachers.

I picture those three pounds like the little bit of snow you pack in your hand to start a snowball. It’s going to keep rolling and rolling, getting bigger and bigger. Someday, instead of those pounds being on me, they’re going to be a big-ass snowman I can keep at a distance.

Anyway, moving on because I don’t intend for this to become the Diet Blog of Doom, this morning the Short Kid needed a little help with his spelling homework early this morning. (Yes, he had Wednesday evening, but he gambled on the snow day, then he had all of yesterday to do it. He gets his procrastination skills from Mom, apparently.) The assignment? Use spelling words to form tongue twisters. He’d already done a few, but he was stuck on the last one.

This is what we came up with:

Nonvenomous nefarious nematodes nick nifty knickers.

(Nonvenomous being the word from the spelling list.)

Me: “Your teacher’s probably going to guess I had a hand in this one.”

SK: “I’ll probably be the only kid with underwear-stealing parasitic worms.”

Probably.