Other People's Kids

Lots o' Stuff

The reason I haven't been writing isn't because of a lack of material, but because of a surplus. I can't do everything justice in the mood I'm in tonight, but in no particular order:

1) We had to put Chewy down. As I've mentioned before, he has always been in bad health since we got him, and it finally got to be too much for us to sit and watch. It was a choice between putting him down or spending God knows how many dollars to try to set it right with no idea if it would even do any good. We made a choice. Hope it was the right one.

2) I'm sitting here tonight getting to know a new dog, currently named Zach (not sure if we'll rename him or not yet). He's a smaller, drool-free variant (as per The Wife's wishes). He's a medium-sized black lab, very sweet temperament, he has one brown eye and one very light blue, and I've got him from the Humane Society for a weekend trial run. So far so good...with only one leg-lifting episode, my very sudden and loud response to which I think made its intended impression.

3) "Celeste" was on "home leave" last weekend. She took the liberty of bringing some kind of pills back with her. "Tammy" was set to stay Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and the two of them got together and decided it would be just peachy keen to down a bunch of pills each. "Celeste" didn't even know what the pills were. Sigh. Off to the hospital, where peeing in a cup became an issue for "Celeste". I had had enough. Let's just say I convinced her to pee in the damned cup so we could go home. Nobody harmed, but "Celeste" is now in psych eval in another city. The Wife made sure she understood that we wanted her back...but not until she had been evaluated. We THINK she may understand now that there's something wrong. Time will tell...but we are child-free for the moment. The Wife is also in the city where "Celeste" is in right now, and will not be back until tomorrow or the next day.

4) We have a new potential placement....but not the usual. This one is a 24-year-old mother and her baby. The Mom has a depressed IQ (she's slow), and it's potentially our job to evaluate her, help her learn how to be a mom, and generally just to try to make this little mini-family functional. Don't know anything about them except their names, their ages, and the fact that the mom insists on being able to smoke. We, of course, will allow no smoking in the house, but we're amenable to her smoking outside so long as she disposes of her butts appropriately. The Wife is scheduled to drive an ungodly number of miles next week arranging all this and seeing if it's even doable for us and them. More later on that.

5) Work sucks. Okay, not really, but this week sucked. It is SO nice to have this little break where I have the house and the animals to myself. Please excuse me while I go soak in some genuine puppy love.

posted by Dan @ 7:41 PM