Dear God, part 2

Last night Zachary wanted to say a different “Dear God” blessing. It went something like this: “Dear God. Thank Daddy for pausing my show. Do good things. Don’t poke people. Amen.” Gotta love a blessing which involves giving God some instructions! Oh, and the part about Daddy pausing his show? We had let him start watching Little Einsteins yesterday but dinner was ready before it was over, so Josh paused the show while we ate, and then we let Zachary finish it afterwards.

Apparently yesterday Liam got to go outside & play for a little bit. The younger kids (like, under 3) are on a separate playground from the older kids. Evidently Zachary’s class was outside at the same time. They weren’t on the same playground, but there is a sort of wrought iron fence separating the 2 playgrounds, and the teachers said that Liam saw Zachary on the other playground, and walked over to him. One teacher even said they were hugging through the fence! That is something I wish I could have seen.

A couple of weeks ago Carrie had talked about how she is sometimes at the end of her rope with Jody ever since Charlotte was born. I had a moment like this with Herschel yesterday. Since I am now picking up, I get home with the kids about 30-45 minutes before Josh gets home. It’s been so nice lately that Zachary has wanted to eat his snack outside every day this week. So we all go outside & hang out till Josh gets home. When we got Herschel, we had installed an electric fence. It worked really well, until the day Josh accidentally cut the wire with the edger. He tried twisting it back together, but it never worked after that. We continued putting the fence collar on Herschel anytime we went outside though, and for a long time he still believed that it worked. Then the collar broke. At that point, we just started putting a regular collar on him, hoping it would fool him. Wrong. He totally figured out that nothing would happen if he crossed out of our yard. So there we were yesterday, waiting for Josh to come home, when Herschel ran over into our next-door neighbor’s yard. He’s done it before, and they have a dog too (which is why he ran over there – he saw their dog). The lady who lives there was outside talking to the lady on the other side, so Zachary, Liam, and I went over to try and get Herschel back in our yard. I get so furious with him, because when he was a puppy, we had taken him to dog training classes, which obviously were a total waste of money, considering that he will not come when you call him – in fact, he does the opposite…he runs the other way (this is why Herschel will never see the inside of a dog park – we would never get him back). Anyway, so Herschel was running around like a total freak, ran into the yard 2 doors down, crossed the street into the yard over there, came back, ran around some more, terrorized some kids…meanwhile, I was holding Liam, making it next to impossible to make any real attempt at chasing Herschel, so one of the neighbors took Liam from me so I could run after Herschel like a fool. After a couple of minutes, Liam started to cry because he realized it was no longer me holding him, so I took him back. I just kept thinking that Josh ought to be home any second and he could help me get this stupid dog back in our house. Well, finally, I guess Herschel decided the game was over, and he headed towards our back door. Just in time for Josh to pull up. Herschel has now officially lost all privileges to be in our yard without a leash, which is really sad, but I guess he did it to himself.