My dear readers – it has been a long
while. But thought it only polite to try and squeeze in a quick post before we
open The Forge for the season and life switches up a gear again. Of course, the
past few months have been just one big holiday what with the two businesses,
full-on corporate job, two kids under 7, the veg patch, the farm and now THREE
bloody dogs!
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| Talisker, or Tal for short |
“It will be so lovely to have one
of Bru’s pups”, we said. “How charming for the girls to have a puppy”, we said.
“We’re both around so much a pup will just blend in”, we said. OMG – how wrong
we were. How can we have forgotten how intense and demanding a small dog can be?!
Add into the mix our own personal
Brexit and things just get even more stressful. You see, pup number two, is headed
for our good friends in Ireland but due to the, ahem, delays and general fuckwittery
surrounding our exit from the EU, getting a doggie passport is proving rather
challenging. So, we have double trouble. Lovely that the brothers get to keep
each other company and entertain each other. A killer when your two hands are
playing against their eight legs when trying to move them anywhere. The kids are of course delighted that they get a dog each, but when the four of them are together I am not sure who is more at risk than who - the girls from scratches and bites, or the puppies from being mauled and manhandled all day long. And don’t
even talk to me about the house training…..
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| Working title: Oreo |
And as if the 5am starts, constant
pee and poo monitoring, not to mention removing any object within chewing
distance were not enough, today things got a whole lot more stressful.
So here I am, home alone, with the
kids and animals while hubby is away entertaining a stag group. Our eldest
daughter is in the finals for a Welsh poetry recitation at 8.30am in a town 12
miles away, and we have to deal with all the lovely farming jobs before we go. Make
it to the competition with just moments to spare, sit in the hall mentally
checking and rechecking everything we have forgotten to do. Frankly it is little
short of miraculous that we are not in our pyjamas/covered in dog hair (or
worse)/wearing wellies. Add into the mix that I chose today to do an Instagram
takeover for one of our partner businesses (so am effectively managing three
social media accounts today), am having to deal with booking enquiries for Easter
and had to organise our branded clothing order whilst in the ‘big town’. Multi-tasking
in the extreme!
And just when I thought things
couldn’t get any worse, I arrive back late morning, having bribed the children
with cake from Costa so I could ‘treat’ myself to a coffee to get through the
day. They are high as kites from the refined sugar (why do I do these things to
myself?!), the pups have destroyed a juggling ball (how it got into their cage and
what it was filled with I do not know) and also had several ‘accidents’. As I am
clearing up this chaos the children then decide it would be a wonderful idea to
get the paint out and start painting the puppies’ paws to make cards to send to
people. I turn my back for max 5 mins and when I go back outside the scene of
carnage makes me want to weep. Paint and paw prints everywhere. And not some lovely
colour but BLOOD RED, BLACK and BROWN. Dogs covered. Kids covered. Garden destroyed.
Whereupon, into this Jackson Pollock-esque tableau, I kid you not, wander two
Jehovah’s Witnesses. Well, I have never seen two JHs back away into their car
and drive away so quick. They didn’t even try to impress upon me the
Watchtower. I think the look of Medusa-like rage on my face must have terrified
them!
So here I am six hours later. Sat
in the remains of my garden in the dark, save for my headtorch which I am using
to track the puppy’s every move whilst inwardly praying for rain (to clean up
the paint – no way I am going to waste valuable energy on that) and that these
sodding dog’s will do their business so I can go to bed! (Maybe I should have harked
the words of our Jehovah’s friends earlier to speed this whole process along!).
My fingers are freezing, I’m wearing some horrid hair mask thing to zap the
headlice (that’s a whole other saga for another day!) and a manky old woolly hat.
Is this what my Saturday nights have become???
I know we will look back on these
moments with fondness in the years to come but right now the cuteness is
somewhat outweighed by the sheer upheaval of two more dependants into the mix.
And as for poor old Bru, he has literally just come and laid his head on my lap
with a look of stoic resignation on his face. "If thing are hard for you
just think how I bloody feel", he says, with a sideways glance to the two little
upstarts, who have already usurped his comfy dog bed!
