Tina and I love our kids. I cannot even tell you how glad we are to have the girls home for even part of a summer. To be honest though we didn’t have a lot of time to miss them this winter. Our lives were so busy.
I think we have discovered a key to conquering the empty nest. Staying busy enough to have to schedule pee breaks helps a lot.
One way we did that is by buying replacement children (at least that’s what our kids call them). Last Father’s Day Amanda our oldest daughter gathered the other kids into a pact to buy us two maltese puppies. I say pact because buying maltese is not just a decision it is almost a religious commitment.
Now we have had dogs before. I have to admit we have always been consummate failures at keeping them. I always said that if we got a dog again we were going to make a long term commitment to it, no more of this “love ’em ’til they grow up” poop. I didn’t realize when I said it that my word would be tried with not one but two white fluffy children.
We struggled with the names at first. We decided to name them after the hero and heroine of our favorite movie, The Count Of Monte Cristo. Edmond and Mercedes were so cute together those first weeks. They pretty much fit into my coffee mugs when we first got them. It was two weeks in, that I decided Edmond was far too human a name for my little boy. So we changed his name to Jacopo.
By the end of summer, when the kids had to leave, I had learned why we were never able to keep dogs before. We had kids. When you have three kids to truck around, do home work with, and keep house for, who has time for a dog?
Now that I have two maltese who need to be walked 5 times a day, washed and blow dried, held and played with and brushed every day who has time for kids?
Reinventing the We'll 