Erin & Ted's Family Log

New Member of the Family

2008-05-01T16:19:00.002-06:00

Yes, the entourage expands. Ted said something about getting a new hunting dog in the pipeline for when Mook is too old, mum saw an ad in the Emmett paper, and the next thing we know we have this massive chocolate lab with one brown eye and one blue eye. She weighs 80lbs, she's (at Pet Adoption League's best guess, 2 years old.

She was found with her mother 'running out in the country on a winter day - in extreme danger of being run over by a car'. The ad we saw was actually for her mother, a larger black lab - but she seemed a little too sedate for us, so we opted for the rather more spritely daughter. Here they both are with their foster families in Emmett.

Our dog had been given the rather unoriginal name of Koko by her foster family (the mother was called 'Ebony'. We changed it to 'Maggie'. Ted says it's after Margaret Thatcher. I don't know about that.

I have to say, Maggie has been little but trouble since we got her. For a start, she took to chewing up many of our possessions and making a general mess every time we left the house with no-one but Mook in charge. These possessions included a couple of the kids' stuffed toys, several drinking cups, some of Louis' bottles, other toys, some of our shoes, a place mat, a dog bed, a bottle of lotion and a book by Charles Barkley. On top of all this she would regularly empty the contents of the recycle bin and strew it all around the house, and once got into the garbage cans outside (which contained among other things a large number of used diapers) and emptied it all over our lawn. She also ate the last slice of my birthday cake one night.

The trouble didn't end there. Just as the chewing and messiness seemed to be coming under control, Maggie started getting interested in breaking out every time we left the house. On top of this, we noticed that she was bleeding all over the place. A visit to the vet and we found - surprise! - she wasn't spayed after all. Not pleased! So we got her taken care of - but even so, a few stitches didn't seem to put her off breaking out of the yard. We realized that our gates are no longer very secure. We did what we could to temporarily repair them until new gates could be installed - but nothing we did could stop her. She always managed to break through, like a battering ram, and start parading around the neighborhood looking for dog friends. Mook, instead of trying to set a good example, would take advantage of her knack for breaking open gates and go running off with her. We got a call one morning from Animal Control telling us of complaints about a large brown dog and a smaller white dog who 'acts aggressive'. Yes, Mook actually scares people.

The same day we had the call from Animal Control, I fixed the gates as best I could before going to pick up the kids from daycare. Ted was out at a meeting. When I came home the dogs were gone. I spent some time yelling for them, Max helping. Every so often Max would point at the window and say 'Maggie!' and I'd rush to the window to find that he hadn't really seen her after all - he was just joking, or winding me up, or who knows what. Very frustrating. I packed the kids in the car and drove around looking for them - no dice. Finally after half an hour I glimpsed Mook down the street, looking a bit bored. I yelled to him and he slowly came trotting back, looking rather tired. I put the kids back in the car, drove to the spot I'd seen him, and there was Maggie, trying to make friends with a black lab. A very kind lesbian couple who had happened to be passing helped me get her into the car and gave much advice about tags and microchipping - the owner of the black lab stood there chuckling and saying something about Maggie having broken his dog's heart.

When we got back to the house, I shut them in the house with the kids and went to the gates once again. I wedged bits of wood under them to prevent them from opening. Just as I was done, I heard, somewhere on the other side of the house, a little voice yelling 'Maggie! Maggie!' I ran back into the house. The front door was wide open and the dogs were out running amok in the street again, while Max stood by the side of the road yelling 'Maggie!' He had obviously found the going-out-and-yelling-for-the-dogs game incredibly fun, and wanting to repeat the experience had opened the door for them then went running after.

Since then Ted has built new five-foot high gates. Maggie still got out. It turns out our back fence is no match for her either. Fortunately now she doesn't go very far, because Mook doesn't have her fence-jumping agility and she doesn't like to be parted from him for very long.

A new back fence is on the horizon, then. But she is still a very, very sweet dog. She's pretty intelligent, is great with the kids, and she and Mook seem to adore each other. Maybe she'll even make a good hunting dog.

Airplanes! Part II

2008-04-18T22:12:00.006-06:00

The following Friday we made a similar trip, only this time I took the time to look over googlemaps and find a park close to the flightpath of airplanes taking off and landing at the airport. The best I could find was Phillippi Park near Orchard. The place wasn't exactly pictureque - a lack of trees gives you get a lovely view of I-84 - but it had swings, a basketball court and most importantly, regularly scheduled takeoffs of SouthWest Airlines 737s for your entertainment. Max loved it. He swung (swang? swinged?) as high as I could push him, gazing up at the sky and pointing and screaming with happiness. "Appwane! Oh, issa appwane! Wow! Appwane! Issa appwane!"

I think he liked imagining that he was flying as he looked at them. He was completely oblivious to the fact that he seemed to be setting a trend - within a few minutes another kid came up saying to his mum 'I want to swing high so I can see the airplanes'. Max still managed to find me satisfactory entertainment, however; when an airplane wasn't roaring overhead, he got plenty of enjoyment from me trying to catch and tickle his feet as he swung back and forth.

Louis wasn't quite so taken with the airshow, but when he woke up he was very happy to be put in one of the swings. I was surprised at how high he was happy to swing. I crouched on the ground in front of him and he had a great time swing towards me and back again.

After maybe half an hour, a gathering of three - four year old tots had accumulated and seemed to be hovering. I managed to coax Max off the swing by suggesting that we get ice-cream. Cowardly, perhaps, but when you're a 5'5" weakling it's no fun pushing a baby in a stroller through a park while carrying a thrashing, screaming two-year old.

Max was reluctant to surrender the swing, but as soon as it was occupied by another child, he turned his interest to the basketball courts. Lucky enough to find a semi-deflated green ball, he grabbed it in his arms and ran up the court with it as though he was being chased. He's watched a lot of basketball with his dad, so he knows how it works, and as he ran up the court I could tell that he was imagining some great turn-over play (if that's the correct terminology) that he'd seen with Ted the night before. He can't dribble, so instead he banged the ball against the ground like someone trying to crack open a coconut, then made a valiant attempt at a shoot. The hoop being five times his height and the ball more like a flimsy balloon, he wasn't successful. But he had fun showing off for me and Louis, and we played around on the grass for a while before finally leaving to get an icecream.

Thank God for drivethrus! The trick with a McDonalds $1 cone is to scoop most of the ice-cream into a napkin before giving to the child. One then has a reasonable pile of ice-cream to lap up, the child has his cone and everybody's happy. We drove back via Gowen Field again, and looked at the planes one more time before heading home.

Airplanes! Part I

2008-04-11T01:20:00.049-06:00

Max and Louis and I have been making a few field trips on Friday mornings. Right now, Airplanes are perhaps Max's favorite thing to see and talk about - closely followed by choo-choo-trains, big trucks and boats. His interest became an obsession after we visited the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa. He now has several toy planes and likes pointing out the various components of the plane and naming them, eg. wheels, wing, engine, tail, nose.

One morning we dropped Ted off at the airport, and Max was so excited to see the airplanes that I drove us around past the departures level a couple of times. He liked the big FedEx planes. So, strange though it may sound, whenever I have Max in the car and I'm close to the Boise Airport, he gets pretty excited because I usually drive around it once or twice for his entertainment.

So, on Friday 11th we drove out to the airport and looked at the planes, then drove out through Gowen Field so that Max could look at the light aircraft and all the tanks parked there. It sounds terribly boring, but Max's enthusiasm for every piece of machinery we passed was so great, it made me feel like we were driving through one of the prettiest areas of town.

We continued along that stretch all the way out to Discovery Park where we had a little Arby's picnic. Max got VERY wet paddling in the river. I had to change all his clothes in the car, which was unfortunate since the only spare pants I had for him were his snowpants. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny. Louis, on the other hand, was quiet as usual, watching the proceedings with mild interest, happy to have a bottle of milk to clutch onto.

We drove back the way we came, driving quite slow and looking up out the windows at airplanes flying close overhead along the way. We listened to the Katamari soundtrack as we went which Max is very taken with at the moment. It made him laugh all the way home as he drank his milk and ate his curly fries.

A good day.

Welcome

2008-04-03T00:38:00.002-06:00

Hello, welcome to Our Family Log. For want of a better name.

I never really understood the point of blogs, until recently. I came to understand it as I read a blog some friends of ours kept, as they went through the process of adopting a baby girl. Their records were so regular and yet so detailed - when they described their first meeting with their daughter, I almost felt like I was there with them. But the blog was not only a treasure because of its power of communicating an event to others, but because it can last for that family, for that girl, to read and recall such valuable memories with an immediacy and accuracy of detail.

Let's face it, I'm never going to take up scrapbooking. I don't have time to sit down with scissors and glue and pretty paper and somehow make the perfect memorial of a given event. One day's worth of memories would take me a whole day or more to arrange - (time I could be spending making another day worth remembering) and I know that I would wind up with a gorgeous-looking scrapbook, virtually empty, with a pile of photos and maybe some notes stacked next to it gathering dust. Meanwhile my children are growing and changing every day. Each day is unique and contains something new and vital, and so many of them are worth recording. The immediate ease of a blog is the answer. So, thanking our friends for their inspiration, here is our family blog.

To start of with, our two babies are Max 'Munchie' Miller (Maxwell Theodore John) and Louis 'Bean' Miller (Louis Jason Douglas). Max is almost 2 1/2 years old, and Bean is about 7 months old. We all live in Boise, Idaho, USA with our two dogs, Mook, a runty yellow lab, and Maggie, our new 2 year old, less-runty chocolate lab. We also have two cats, Oswald, the great white Cat, and Ralphie, formerly known as Crappy, the little ginger stripy fellow. We had some fish once but - well, we've just never gotten that worked up over fish. Their names were Fish, Fish and Fish.

At some point I'll post some more family background and history and all that, but this introduction seems enough for now.