Finger Happies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's been a fun, but not terribly interesting week. Sadie is fitting in well. The kids are running in the door from school every day to play with her. I'm to the point I trust her to stay inside the house all day while we're at work/school. The worst thing she's done is gotten into the garbage. We changed our kitchen garbage can to a "dogproof" one and just need to remember to toss any food based garbage into that can. She had individual incidents with each cat. Sadie first snapped at Simon and then at Tiger. I've never seen either cat jump so high! Simon is so needy for human attention he got over it and has been spending most of his time in the house with the dog. Simon's cautious, but brave. Sadie is jealous, but so far obeying my wishes she doesn't hurt or kill him. Tiger is a different story... Mr. Large and in Charge had the wind knocked out of his sails and has spent the week nervous and slinking around. Tiger's scared of the dog. I don't think he's ever been scared of ANYTHING other than the vacuum before, so he's taking extra time.

Yesterday I took Sadie to the vet for shots. She's a sweetheart and I can't imagine her biting, but with all the extra kids around I wanted her up to date and legal on her rabies vaccine. I filled out the paperwork for a new animal, waited and waited with the nervous, whiny dog and was finally called back to a room. The tech came in with surgery and bloodwork consent forms. WHAAAAA? Wait a minute! Sadie's here for shots, not surgery! The tech was confused because all the paperwork implied Sadie was there to be spayed. Um... The vet came in confused as well but then snapped back into sense and was all "Of course we can put off the surgery and only do shots today." I snapped back into my own sense and replied that of course she needs to be spayed and we might as well get it over with. I certainly don't want any Sadie/Stupid Neighbor Dog puppies! (Of course neighbor man refuses to get his awesome specimen of a border collie neutered because he apparently wants to single-handedly ruin the entire breed with Stupid's crap genes.) Anyway, I had originally planned to put off the surgery for a couple of weeks just so Sadie could get used to living with us, etc. before we dumped her at the vet's for the night. Now I'm glad I went ahead and got it over with. I still don't have a clue how a minute-long phone conversation about my new dog needing SHOTS resulted in a SURGERY appointment?!

Other than Sadie, the biggest thing in our house this week was Finger Happies. Kaylin and one of her friends from school created these pointy finger puppets and decided to sell them. They made up an advertisement jingle and "hired" a boy to print some fliers. She even came home and made more Finger Happies rather than playing outside with the neighbor kids. Ok, I'm all about encouraging Kaylin's creativity. I had my own "business" at school trading polished rocks, stickers and stamps. It's one of my favorite memories of grade school. However, Kaylin was soooo annoyingly exuberant about this project, I sort of wanted to gag her, burn all the Finger Happies, ban the jingle and especially ban the words Finger Happies from ever being spoken in the house again. Ever. The kid was manic with her excitement over these puppets. She spoke nonstop about them and the more excited she got, the louder she got. The louder she got, the more rapidly and unending she talked about the Finger Happies. My head was seconds from exploding. And then...

Mrs. W saved the day! She's the kids' Latchkey teacher. If Kaylin was annoying at home all by herself, I can't even IMAGINE how annoying she was surrounded by friends! First, the song was banned. Then, when it was obvious the excitement was NOT going to die anytime soon, the puppets themselves were banned. Kaylin's partner in crime was "written up" for talking back to Mrs. W about the puppet banishment. Kaylin held her tongue. However, she spent the entire night thinking of ways to "push Mrs. W's buttons" on the last day of school. Finger Happies mania has died down. If I never hear or write those words again, I'll be more than fine with that!