Mostly About the Dog

Angie is turning out to be a great puppy, mostly. She's already starting to understand the concepts of potty training. She rarely goes in her pen in our bathroom, where she spends the nights and naptimes during the day. We have a training pad for her in the corner, but she only uses it in an emergency. She'd rather wake us up with whining to take her outside first. I hate the whining with a passion, but it's good that she'd rather go outside than in her pen. She still has frequent accidents when she's out running around, especially poop, but that's already getting better too.

About that whining, though...It's obnoxious and incessant when she wants out for any reason, even just to play. There is no sleeping through it, whether it's at night or early in the morning or during one of Patrick's naptimes. We're all suffering from a slight lack of sleep due to the furry thing residing in our bathroom. If she weren't so darn cute, I think we might have traded her in awhile ago.

Patrick loves the puppy, though, and he seems to have grasped the concept that she's sticking around. It didn't take him long to learn her name. He lapses into his "kitty" voice and says, "A-gee" every time he sees her. Considering how rare it is to even hear "Dada," that's quite the compliment. He's not as keen on actually playing with her or petting her, though. I think he got licked in the face a few too many times over Christmas, so now he squeezes his eyes shut and turns his head when he sees Angie coming. It's too bad because Angie really wants to play with Patrick. I'm working on keeping her away from him until he learns she won't do that to him (as long as we continue training her not to).

When Patrick hears Angie bark, that cute little puppy yip, he laughs. He was trying to imitate it during lunch today, yipping right back at her. He was also imitating her play growls when she was playing with me this afternoon. Apparently her little noises are fascinating and thrilling to imitate. It's so cute to watch the two of them together.
Okay, now a few stories just about Patrick. He is such a little boy. He loves playing with his blocks, even though he hasn't figured out how to stack them yet. Usually they stay in a messy pile where he dumped them out of their bag. If I try to stack them neatly for him, though he reacts. He'll come crawling over to the stack as fast as he can and sweeps a hand through them, scattering them everywhere. He's not happy until there are no little neat stacks left. I don't know how he can be his daddy's son to love chaos and mess that much.

Patrick's new thing during diaper changes is to have me "eat" his foot. Every single time he lies on his changing table, before I can put his pants back on, he holds his foot up toward my face. He watches as I grab his foot and pretend to eat it, saying "Yummy, yummy," at the same time. Then he giggles wildly. It's so much of a routine that he screamed at Daddy earlier for not eating his foot before taking him out of the room. The things he finds amusing crack me up sometimes.