And the little dog too.

I am now the mother of two young adults. God help me. Please.

Jill turned 18 shortly before Christmas. She couldn't decide if she wanted to have a party or not, and kept asking my advice. My response was that I was done planning birthday party about the time her brother hit double digits. That, of course, was met with a flip of the hair and a heavy sigh (probably inherited from her grandfather), and a quick retreat from the room. In the end, she decided against a party, but had a quiet lunch at Harold's Steer In, an icon on the east side of Indianapolis. (Don't ask me why it says 16+ years on the east side, because I've lived here for 16 years, and it was here long before me. But I digress.)

Later that afternoon, she decided that she "needed to go and do something I couldn't do before I turned 18." Well, I laid it on the line. Smokes or porn. That's pretty much it. She was both grossed out and disappointed, since she doesn't smoke, and is definitely not into Playboy. She thought about it for a while and finally decided that she needed to get a lottery ticket. We went up to CVS, where she asked for a lottery ticket, with the biggest grin you've ever seen. Sue, the cashier who, incidentally, has known her her whole life, asked for her id. Jill had more than a passing resemblance to the Cheshire cat as she passed her license across the counter. Sue laughed and said "are you turning 18 today? My nephew did the same thing on his birthday." She needed a lot of help in figuring out how to pick numbers, but paid her dollar and promptly gave it to me.

::makes mental note to check those numbers, as the ticket is still in my coat pocket::

Next, she said she needed to go to Blockbuster, because she wanted to get her very own card, because she couldn't do that till she was 18. Changed her mind when she realized that she needed a credit card to do it, and instead asked if we could go to Petsmart. Petsmart doesn't require a credit card in order to get a card, so we headed that way. Halfway there, Bratty says "oh no, let's just go to Uncle Bills. They're closer." It was cold and I was tired, so it sounded good to me, and we headed there.

Uncle Bill's is a nice little chain of pet stores where the people really do know their stuff, and there's nice variety. You can walk right in and pet the guinea pigs, rabbits, and parakeets. Jill beelined for the back, and it wasn't till that moment that I realized I'd been duped. Uncle Bill's has puppies. "Mooommmy. Can I just hold one? Pleeeeease?"

Within half an hour, we walked out with a Cairn Terrier puppy -- all 6.5 lbs. of him. Now, before you complain, I used to know a member of Uncle Bill's family, and she always said that they didn't go to puppy mills to get their puppies. Jill, my animal rights girl, asked enough questions to satisfy her conscience, and off we went. Being cold, he started shivering on the way home, so she tucked him into her jacket. We went in the house with his little head poking out of a half zipped barn jacket. Dan met us at the door and yelled "oooooooh no. You just turn around and take that thing right outta here. I'm not having another dog."

Jill made a beeline upstairs, at my suggestion, while Dan and I had a scene that was straight up Archie Bunker raging about Meathead.

A week later, I got up only to find him throwing the ball for the puppy at 7:30 in the morning. "But I still didn't want a third dog," he says. Yeah, right. He's actually rather taken with this small ball 'o wirey hair that, when held up in the air, never stops moving, like he's on some invisible moving sidewalk. Thomas, in his normal hulking way, has sworn that he is going to kill the dog -- not like he did with the last one, who peed on the floor if Thomas so much as said his name -- but because this little beast runs underfoot constantly.

Said beast is heretofore known as Rocky. Yep, I have a 70+ lb dog called Rocky, and a 6 lb dog known as Timmy. Add to that the 65 lb Boo, and it's just crazy. But who could not love this face?



So yeah, we got us a little Toto dog to go with the other pair 'o mutts, and Utter Chaos is in full tilt in 2009. How's your new year going?