Tom the puppy (seen on the left of the image)
keeps company in his new home with a cat (‘pon her owner’s knee)
and a dog, his great-grandsire (seen at far right).
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From the category archives:
dogs
It is well known by his admirers that my old boy Arthur is a terrier of surpassing manliness, in an anthropomorphised world where, yes, this house attributes gendered values to its animals for fun. Truly, he is the Thomas Wyatt of Norwich Terriers: hunter, wooer, courtier, diplomat and poet (the last one wholly metaphorically). Whoso list to hunt, he knows where is an hedgehog.
That is the first fact.
The new baby takes happy comfort from a pacifier as she makes the transition from feeding to sleeping, or winding to sleeping, or staring at shadows and bright colours to sleeping. However, she can also with mighty power spit the pacifier distances both large and small.
That is the second fact.
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Our dogs are gradually rejoining the new household. The harvestparents had a double burden of care, not only with the unexpected arrival of the harvestbaby, necessitating a rapid transfer of the dogs to them, but also by all the bitches coming into season within a few days of each other (as is the way with cohabiting mammals of the same species). The return of Arthur and Eddie took the nearby household arrangements off crated rotation, and now Fern has rejoined us for good. She has filled out greatly following the weaning of the puppies and now has that cobby look for which Norwich Terrier breeders strive in the just-shy-of-eugenics manner that is the anxious mode of the dog fancy.
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There is so much lore surrounding little babies that it is hard to believe all of it is based in truth, or at least experience, and of course, public health educators have the heavy task of updating the world as to what has been superseded by new knowledge. So the last three weeks (three weeks!) have been an education of their own in experiencing first-hand some of what is talked about obliquely, indirectly, and with those kinds of knowing ciphers (that word again) in which parents speak.
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It is my contention that most metaphors involving dogs have a very literal vehicle, particularly that sub-class of metaphor, the simile. Just four days at home have reminded me of the truth in the action “to follow around like a little dog”. It is both a pleasure and an obstacle to be accompanied by a pack wherever I go around this small house. There is something marvellously surreal about opening the toilet door into the hall and finding eight attentive and slightly concerned expressions waiting there. (It is the one room into which they are not allowed, you see.)
The puppies have a high tolerance for winter and rough weather and are happiest exploring the daily minor changes of the garden (or, more accurately, tiny mud-paddock with shrubs). Their incursions and excursions lead to many exclamations of “mucky pup!” All this will I hope prepare young Tommo well for his pending relocation to southern Wairarapa, where he will have the deputy rule of a garage bed and a very large lakeside to call his own. Jackie is deeply ensconced in her Sockburn pack and will never leave us, while the search for the right home for Rosie (who most resembles not only her dam but also a small piglet) remains intermittent and not yet fruitful. Meanwhile, Fern has come into season again, which means it is six months since this round of breeding (dogs, not people) began. Sometimes, gestational time flies.
The puppies have the same run of the house and section as the adult dogs but at night are confined to their bed-and-pen, the Poo Palace, which is these days host to considerably less poo than in the past — as it should be at four months old. Adjacent to the table where our computers rest, it is, however, increasingly a receptacle for accidental object drops. If your loose power cord dangles into the Poo Palace, it will not be returned; neither will your charger nor your plastic ephemera. Electronics plugged in are kept high and out of reach; it is the odd jolt to the cable laid idly by that signals its exit from the world of usability and its careful, nay painstaking, segmentation by tiny, high-functioning teeth.
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I am never sure why the habit of photographing puppies tails off (as ’twere) as they get older, since they remain no less adorable. It is in part, I suppose, their now total mobility. I have a collection of blurry images that tell the viewer little. Much amusement is at present created by encouraging the pups to climb the front stairs, then watching as Rosie and Jackie descend and Tom is confronted by a (temporary) failure of his confidence with regard to the business of just how to get down again. He paces along the porch boards looking thoughtful, assuming that at some point the solution will reveal itself.
The era of universal bities has happily passed and toes and socks are safe again, although Rosie continues a certain amount of project management in this area on her own. The predictability of elimination is growing and housetraining will soon have to commence. I am one who favours thoroughness rather than haste in this, but it never gets any easier or more fun.
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The days are filled with writing, of a purposive, industrial kind, as well as the usual demands of course materials and curriculum. I feel at times as if all the skills of my erstwhile liberal arts education are being mobilised in a way that’s untypical. Academic arguments typically gain their urgency under the pressure of deadlines functional rather than industrial and have consequences somewhere along the professional/individual borderline, unlike this sweep more institutional.
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Your baby is as tall as an English hothouse cucumber
In a chronological outcome as predictable to you as it is remarkable to me, I am now six months pregnant, and experiencing what might best be described as a personalised redistribution of corporeal largesse as a result. I am tight of calf, lean of back and as rotund and smooth in front as a seal or (my preferred image) a penguin on its nest (even if it is the male penguin that has this role). I have lost the flexibility that previously characterised my Rubenesque form, and can no longer tuck myself into a chair in the corner of a bar or a meeting. No, my preferred posture is now perhaps politely described as lounging, and more accurately as lolling. This is, as friends and semi-well-wishers like to point out, only the start. As our obstetrician explained: at twenty-eight weeks, the average weight of baby is 1000 grams, whereas at thirty-eight weeks it is 3000 grams. I am not afraid of looking ridiculous, but am a bit worried about the ability of my expanding form to hold itself up in the meantime. By day’s end I already long for some sort of bamboo or fibreglass scaffolding on which to trolley my passenger.
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… a spunky little dog that loves to know what is going on, who is going to be there, and generally be the center of anything that is going on.
The puppies are a one-month-old delight today. The only regret I have is the limited amount of time in the day there is to spend with them, narrowed as it is two-fold by my working schedule and their sleeping schedule, each of which is extensive. They are making a good fist — or rather, face-full — of solid food and Tom, physically the most precocious, is already cutting teeth.
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Baby the Bittersweet
8 August, 2010
in at home, commentatrix, dogs, the social round, we are family
Centripetal Emotion
[click to continue…]
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