When we moved into our house last July, we ran out of money while doing the fence.  Even with the great discount Troy and Travis gave us, we could only afford to fence three sides of our back yard.  We figured that our 12 year old mutt would have no desire to wander beyond the wooded area behind the house, so what was the point?

We were wrong.

She’s not stupid, Delilah.  She always comes home, but she enjoys hanging out with the neighbors behind us.  They probably don’t enjoy it as much as she does, especially when they are trying to eat on their deck and she visits and breathes her rotten fish breath on them or farts in their general vicinity. 

Tonight we let her out for one of her usual pee breaks (she has the need to go every 15 minutes – old age really does suck!) and she returned to the door looking like this:

Note the leaf still stuck in the loaf of bread.  Where did it come from, you ask?  No idea.  She apparently stole it from the neighbors or rooted around in someone’s garbage.  She’s such a dork – she didn’t even know what to do with it.  She just sat there with it in her mouth, probably fantasizing about it being a dead squirrel or something. The one other time in her life she caught something, it happened to be a duckling (don’t worry, the duckling was fine).  She saw them swimming in the pond near Mike’s old apartment and decided to go for a dip and catch herself a duck.  When to her amazement she managed to get one, she had NO IDEA what to do with it, and ran toward me with a frightened look. I beat her until she dropped the duck, and the duckling ran off to its mother.  Delilah’s lucky the mother duck didn’t go after her – this is the same dog that had her butt kicked by a neighborhood cat.  Thankfully we didn’t buy her for protection. 

Other updates that are semi-interesting:

- Bizarre Bazaar is coming along.  I never thought it could take this many hours to price and label things, let alone deal with the space issues arising from trying to display 15 manufacturer’s stuff in a 10 x 10 booth, but we are managing.  Troy built the booth and it is fabulous.  We’ll post pictures at some point.  Jennifer’s been documenting our struggles and triumphs.  If you are one of my friends, and have heard nothing from me in weeks, it is because a.) I am not so hot as a friend right now and b.) we have been working non-stop for about a month. 

-  Lily had a play date Saturday with her friend Emma, and they had a fabulous time.  I like Emma’s mom a lot, and enjoy hanging out with her. It’s very cool to see my eldest daughter learning to interact with her friends, and sharing, and creating weird games and saying hilarious things.  Since I got her the Rodney Copperbottom plush toy from ebay, Lily carries it with her everywhere, so it was interesting seeing how she incorporated it into her games with Emma.  Emma and Lily are quite the precocious bunch of 4 year olds. Listening to the two of them talk blows my mind. 

-  Sunday, Lily went to her favorite boy’s party.  I’ve written about him a lot but took pictures of him off the blog because his mother was a bit freaked out by it, and I understand. If you missed the pictures of him, you will just have to take my word for it that he is one of the cutest and sweetest boys on the planet, and if I could be assured that I would have one just like him, I’d beg Mike to reverse his vasectomy.  Since there is no such thing, we’ll just call it over at 2 girls. 

Lily and Patrick hadn’t seen each other in about 2 months, but he just ran up to her and hugged her while she pretended she was a piece of wood.  After 5 minutes, she was hugging, chasing and playing with Patrick at the Maymont Nature Center.  When we walked down through the park to see the bears, the two of them held hands and chatted.  Patrick’s mom invited Lily up to Northern VA where they moved to spend the night and have an extended playdate.  He misses her a lot, and his entire family had been told all about the infamous Lily D. by Patrick.  It really touched me that even at this young age, they can establish relationships with others and show compassion and feeling for each other.  She was sad to leave him but had a great time at the party.  She still doesn’t understand why he lives so far away, and why we can’t just pick up and move. 

-  Arden at 2 may not know what flipping me the bird looks like, but she sure does it anyway – sans middle finger.  When she’s not getting in trouble for being overly “sensitive” and being sent to the director’s office twice in one day, she’s full of personality and funny stories.  Last week she insisted on telling the entire Red Room that her “rump hurt” and she needed “cream on my rump”.  This stems from me trying not to call it a butt, since I got in trouble from Lily’s teachers (they had “Silent Lunch” last week because Lily and other members of her group at school were adding words to “butt”, like “buttface”, “buttbrain”, “butthead” and my personal favorite, “buttbreath”, which frankly I found hilarious but apparently the teachers didn’t . . . ). 

I digress.  Anyway, Arden was angry with me this morning because she doesn’t like her routine changed, and I ended up taking them to school today instead of Mike.  She was mad as a hornet from the time she woke up til I dropped her off.  When we arrived at Red Room, everyone was having snack, so Windsor tried to get her to hang out with them, and I tried to get her to hug and kiss me goodbye.  She gave me her most wicked look, turned her back to me and walked to the corner of the room and faced the wall.  If she could have said the words “F You, Mommy”, and shot me the bird, she would have.  She wouldn’t look at me or Windsor, and stood with her back to everyone until well after I had left. Then she finally relaxed and acted nicely. 

Mike and I often say that while Lily can push our buttons, Arden just scares us.  I said, “Can you imagine what life will be like when Lily and 16 and Arden is 14?”  The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Arden is, dare I say it, more strong willed than I am.  Phew.  I am going to need to take a lot of sedatives in order to deal with her. 

-  On the home front, we are in the process of getting a water garden put in the backyard, and Mike has declared the last week of April his “Landscape Challenge” week.  I’ll post pictures as we take them.  Hopefully I will be able to take that week off as well. More importantly, I’m hopeful we can bribe my Uncle Richard with beer and food so he will come up here and help.

That’s about it, and there will be no more blog entries until after Bizarre Bazaar.  If you’re in Richmond, come by and see us in the Forehead Kisses booth.