If you’ve wondered about the radio silence at MommyEnnui lately, I’m happy to announce that it’s due to the arrival of this gorgeous girl, my new daughter Birdie! I’m using her real name here because she is far less likely than Biggie and Smalls to accuse me of exploiting her for page views when she’s a teenager. Miss Birdie is a 4 month-old* pointer/hound-of-some-sort mix and the fur-covered apple of my eye! (Apologies for the disgusting visual.)

The details of her provenance are sketchy because her birth mother was apparently a bit of a whore who was unable to name the last fellow who humped her let alone identify which stud fathered her bastard children. And, while she may regret the anonymous hook-up that resulted in her getting knocked up with multiples she couldn’t afford to feed or send to puppy school, we’re pretty damn happy about it!

This is my first time raising a puppy, so a number of things have come as a bit of a surprise. For example, it turns out that dogs aren’t born inherently knowing how to walk in a straight line or having the slightest idea why one would want to do so, for that matter. I also didn’t realize that I would get virtually no help from Biggie and Smalls because they’d spend the majority of the time standing atop chairs, screaming in fear of Birdie’s needle-sharp piranha teeth. Every person we told we were thinking of getting a puppy said the same thing…”hide your shoes!” However, no one warned us that little missy would also attempt to eat clean laundry, dirty laundry, the shirts off our backs, rugs, bugs, rocks, sticks, weeds, grass, trash and much, much more.

The good news is that the rest of the family is similarly riddled with character flaws, aggression issues and eating compulsions so I think Birdie’s going to fit in just fine!

*It turns out that Birdie is not actually 4 months old as we were initially told at the shelter where we got her. A further inspection of her paperwork revealed that she’s actually only 2 1/2 months old. This means that she will be a bigger girl than we expected and that we will enjoy 1 1/2 additional months of having our appendages punctured by the dog version of a lawn aerator. Wheeeee!!!