Where, Oh Where, Has My LIttle Dog Gone?

Some of you know the story by heart. The naive young couple move, first from a farm, then from a ranch with their 6 farm kids to a small plot subdivision. The children, including the known wanderer, miraculously seem to be contained even without a fence, but just to be on the safe side the farm dog stays at the ranch while the intelligent couple surround the yard with a four foot fence, then reclaim the dog. It is only a matter of weeks before the farm dog learns to jump the four foot fence and regain her farm freedom. We chase her down almost every day and meet many neighbors, police officers, animal control officers, school principles, and even country landowners miles away, all who love the dog and are very protective, helpful and friendly, but we are constantly worried and annoyed by the "Olive antics", so we finally resort to putting her on tie out cables that allow her access to the entire yard, but she is depressed and frequently winds herself around trees and trampoline legs to the point that she is completely restricted. We finally give in and pull down the entire 4 foot fence that we originally put up and replace it and the back chain link with a 6 foot wooden fence; It takes the entire summer and by Fall it is finished except for a small 42" gap. Fred has run out of materials and steam and good weather, so we block the opening with the leftover chain link roll. We keep Olive contained for a happy two weeks and then she figures how to shimmy under the chain link. We block the bottom with stacks of cinder block, but she moves the cinder block. We barricade it with garbage cans and long cedar planks and a wheelbarrow, but she maneuvers through, knocks over the chain link roll and continues to escape like Houdini. She has now learned that their is wisdom in escaping while we are not watching. She always checks the house windows carefully before heading out, so we sometimes catch her going back toward the "junk pile", but never actually see the flight. It gets to a ridiculous level, where it becomes almost routine for the Elementary school office to call and tell me that Olive is locked in the Kindergarten playground AGAIN, so we revert back to the tie out cables, only this time it has been shortened to 30" so that she can't wind herself around objects. We try to take her out on walks twice a day to get "it" out of her system, but "it" is inborn and so we continue to have guilt and prisoner continues to "sulk". Finally, though Jordan's Eagle project is needing every spare minute of Fred's time, I finally beg and plead for him to spend a half hour and secure the opening. Fred builds a more permanent fence piece all the while muttering about us being smarter than a dog and something about him having a degree. I watch Olive stalk the opening all day and give up 3 different times while I am secretly watching her behind the curtain, making sure that she can't see me (she keeps checking). She is contained all day and I am so happy with my brilliant husband. When Fred and the kids get home from church on Sunday there is a note in our door saying that a lady has picked our dog up at the Ridley's grocery store parking lot and is kindly holding her at her house until we get back home(our address is on her tags). Luckily she doesn't want a ransom, but like every other person in our 4 years of Olive experiences, she loves this dog and is so kind to us! When I get home from meetings today, my darling dog is back on her 30 foot ball and chain. Fred scouts out the fence and surmises that our dog has actually climbed the chain link fence. She's smart and highly motivated; we have to admire her persistence.

As soon as Jordan has finished his Middleton sign, Fred will devote his Saturdays to building a 6 foot high fence to replace the chain link and then we will wait to see how many minutes it takes this big, hairy chunk of our heart, to devise a plan to outsmart us once again. I am pondering writing a column in the Middleton Gazette to thank our community for looking out for our dog. If our town ever needs a mascot, I know a black lab that would love the job.

Middleton March Unplugged is going fabulously! I thought we were already pretty "unplugged" as a family, but with all personal radios off, and entertainment computer time gone and weekends void of movies, we have put together a 500 piece puzzle, played Stratego, Bingo, Ruckus, and Storytime. Jordan has taken Abe, Lily and Sophie to the city library and instead of me chasing fussy 4 year old's out of the kitchen during dinner prep, Jordan and Mikayla are wearing them out on the trampoline. Eden has turned into a bit of a book fanatic and since that is not electronic, we have had to spend a bit more time convincing her to "plug in" to us, but "we have ways of making [her] talk", so the first week has been fun, enlightening and so positive. I'm hoping that with three more weeks to go that some of these family times will become habitual and when we plug back in, some things will just fall by the wayside naturally.

Tonight while we were reading scriptures, Jordan was helping Lily with her turn and he said a sentence for her to mimic with the word "heard" in it. Often the little girls don't actually understand what they are repeating but just try to imitate the phonetics of what they hear. Lily replaced the word heard with nerd, and Sophie, under her breath and to herself said, "Nerd? That's weird!" Lily hadn't been phased but Sophie knew that wasn't a common term used in the scriptures and she was a little perplexed.

The twins birthday is tomorrow. They have the whole day planned out. They will have breakfast served in their bedroom on their little table. They each have different menu orders. Then we are off to pick up Fred on his lunch hour for their birthday date at Planet Kid, where Fred and I will remember how old we are getting as we crawl through small plastic tubes and play in the balls. Then they want to do some window shopping in Target, where the shoe aisle holds more appeal than the idea of going to Disneyland. After that, we are home bound to make cakes together which we will decorate with real primroses (we hope they are not poisonous, but we couldn't find any pansies that matched their colors--and we won't eat them). Then family party and F.H.E. Sounds like a lovely, hectic day. They are having trouble sleeping because of the anticipation and Lily is sure that in the middle of the night her five year old body is going to burst out of her four year old pajamas.