Episode 11 - Littering

It’s been a few weeks between posts.  I’ve been busy. 

Thursday.  My alarm went off at 4:30, so early my body tried desperately to convince me it must be a horrible mistake and to go back to sleep.  The day proceeded to be so jam packed, I didn’t even manage to get to the bathroom for about twelve hours, wondering vaguely at one stage, “I’m sure that can’t be good for me…”

By the time I got home with the kids from kindy at 6pm, we were all exhausted and cranky.  As I threw together a less than nutritional meal of baked beans for the small people, I realised three things: our neighbours dogs were making more noise than usual, our dogs were making more noise than usual, and there were loud birds squeaking outside.  My deduction was that the neighbours had bought a couple of birds that their dogs were barking at, and our dogs were barking at theirs.  Simple.

But night fell, and the bird noises continued.  “Hey honey,” I yelled at my weary spouse the second he walked in the door, “I think next door got birds.”  He ignored my clearly delirious statement, and we both set to work getting the kids into bed so we could collapse too.

Cleaning up the kitchen, I threw some scraps to our German Shepherds.  But Saba, our ravenous female, didn’t appear.  And then I noticed the squeaking was even louder, despite it being long past birdy bedtimes.  And finally, the slow mummy had a very belated epiphany:

“Babe?  I don’t think it’s birds…”

My husband came to the door and listened.  “Oh my God, we need a light!  Where’s the torch?”

“We don’t have one!” I said frantically, my skills as a shoddy home-maker exposed.

“We have to!  What about Smudge?  Doesn’t he have a torch?”

So that was how we found ourselves searching the backyard using a Thomas the Tank Engine shaped flash light, which only stayed on for ten seconds at a time, and made inane statements like, “Hello!  I’m Thomas!” and “I’m a really useful engine!” in an overly cheerful voice.

And we found seven puppies.

Yup.  Saba wasn’t just hungry and a bit fat.  She was pregnant.  She'd had the puppies near the fence, hence next door's dogs barking, our dogs were barking at next door's and the "birds" was the puppies crying for milk.  We moved her and the litter inside, both myself and the husband more than a little shell-shocked.

“You know,” I said to Saba as I lay on my belly an hour later, attempting to attach puppies to dog nipples, “I was going to drink wine and go to bed early.  This isn’t how I was planning on spending my night.”

In response to my lack of wonder for the life-changing event that is birth, Saba stood up, faced her rear-end towards me and another puppy fell out not ten inches from my face.  Nice.

There was one final surprise for the evening.  After we finally fell into bed, we discovered that puppies are even noisier than newborns.  Husband went to check on them around midnight, and returned saying, “Now there’s nine.”

“Nine what?”

“Nine puppies.”

“…No… No I refute that.”

But denial or not, there are now nine puppies in my laundry.  Add that to the three dogs, two kids, one husband and many houseplants in various stages of decline and there seems to be no end to the list of small needy things that require my constant attentions. 

And so, I must take my sleep deprived self and I must go.  The puppies need repotting and the basil simply refuses to poo outside…