Dear Blog Readers,

They’re ganging up on me. The children. My nemesis and his adorable little friend (pictured above). Even Mother Nature is giving me the finger. This morning I awakened at 4:00 for a drink of water. I went to the kitchen to discover that either the above dog has gotten incredibly intelligent or one of my children went on a midnight snack run and left the refrigerator door open. In the refrigerator was a pound of beef liver that I had boiled but not yet cut up for training purposes. The key word at this point is was. I found an empty plate (otherwise undisturbed from its resting place – she’s that good) and was met by a very unrepentant dog.

This morning, I discovered half of my favorite pair of shoes destroyed. One hates rugs, the other hates yarn. Maddie cannot stand area rugs to the point that any efforts to stem the flow of snow into my house are met by her bunching up said rug and moving it out of the doorway. Bucky will grab my current knitting project and attempt to carry it away. He doesn’t care about other projects, just the one I am working on now. The vet said he was four or five. I think the vet is full of shit mistaken because of all the “puppy behaviors” he displays – chewing, etc. Shoes, legos and K-nex are not. safe. And he knows nothing. Not sit, not stay, not off. But he has a personality that makes it hard to stay mad at him.

Then we will add the weather. This week I have spent roughly $100 on equipment for wearing these two naughty little hounds out. I bought my first pair of snowboots in a very long time, a split lead so I can take them both on one leash, a backpack for Bucky so we burn more energy on our walks. (I’m reading a dog training book that recommends it for all medium and large sized dogs). Gloves, warm gloves. I am ready for anything! But this shit is ridiculous. So, of course, they’re whining to go outside every ten minutes. This process requires me to put on my full winter battle rattle which takes five minutes and then they only want to be outside two minutes because they’re too cold to do all their business. We come back in, they warm up, I take off my battle rattle and repeat.

It’s going to be a long day.

Send cocoa. With schnapps.

Here are your first shots from New Mexico. They don’t do it justice because they’re just some snaps from a rest area and because I’m a crappy photographer.

I’ll work on getting you a few more in the next couple of years. I promise.

In the “What I Had For Lunch” category, things are going fine except I’d like to know my school schedule and find an income stream.

Peace. Enjoy the pictures.

Then the Nerf Darts course became a maze, then a fort.  It was fun!  The boys started taking pictures of their handiwork and then The Khan got the camera.  This is what you get when that happens.  Notice there’s a picture of every living thing that was in the backyard’s butt including a very attractive picture of Champ.

Yes, we laugh at this kid continuously.

Last Thursday, due to the Queen’s trip to Canadia to visit Axe Murderers and shopaholics, I had to take his Excellency the great and powerful Ptichka Khan to work with me. By his Majesty’s account it was “very boring”. Here’s how it unfolded.

First, we dropped the Czar off at school. He is finishing the year at a school near the Uni I work at so it’s not a big deal except for the whole 7:35 start time thing. And his Majesty, in case I haven’t blogged about it before, is NOT a morning person. We managed to get out of the house with relatively little fuss, drop the Czar off and go to my office.

School is done for the year at my uni. I think I should mention that lest you think I am dumb brave enough to take a five year old to one lecture say nothing about two. It was just an office day and my mission was to waste time until the weather got warmer and we could go to the park.

Here’s the thing about his majesty. He loves to be outside. He would be outside ALL THE TIME if he could. Waiting for the park was killing him.

He lasted until 10:30, bless his heart, and then he needed to go! So we went. We drove the short distance to the park only to discover a bus load of kids just dropped off at the playland part of the park. I don’t do busloads of kids so we decided to check out the zoo. The zoo was closed. Meltdown commences.

His majesty, being 5, considers BK the penultimate cuisine. So I attempted a bribe. We’ll go have lunch and then check out the Children’s Museum! Yay! Won’t that be fun? “No, I want to go to the park.” This exchange repeated itself a couple of times with the same result but since I was driving, I win. We went to BK for lunch and his majesty appropriately attired himself with a crown.

Then, again, because I was driving, we went to the Children’s Museum. The first thing he spied was a rock wall. Had the rock wall been open and available for his majesty’s use, that could have been awesome. The children’s museum was lame! The rock wall was not only closed, there was no indication of when it might be open. The displays were mostly uninteresting and it took quite a while for the Khan to get interested in anything. By that time I was bored.

So about an hour and a half in, I convinced his majesty to take a walk. We walked around downtown until we found a candy store where I allowed his majesty to select a lollipop. Of course, there was a selection of multiple sizes and types available to him and he, being five, chose the biggest one as evidenced above. And he walked in his inimitable (adorable) fashion with his crown on and his huge lollipop as we walked the ten blocks (at most) back to my parking spot. People thought it was his birthday.

His thoughts? “Mama, you’re kind of boring.”

See for yourself.