Saturday Morning Vignette

Today we are cleaning the house, to impress strangers who are coming here to pick up a free couch. Free, because Amy believes, from all her crunch-mom research, that the foam inside the couch is hypertoxic, and of course there is foam all over the house, since the children eviscerated the bottom part of the couch some time ago. Thanks to Craig's List, people we don't know will come and take it away for free, such that we won't have to pay for a rental truck and then pay again at the town dump to get rid of it. And of course, this faux-leather couch, inherited from the lady who owned our house before us and apparently didn't feel like taking it with her, will eventually be replaced by a futon. We don't live in Vermont, but we may as well...

This means that Daddy gets to vacuum. Since Bunny's pen required extensive vacuuming, I let her out of it, giving her free run of the family room, to diminish the trauma of all that rattling and noise, and also to give her her own "Born Free" moment. Of course, between Madeleine and the dogs, freedom ain't freedom after all, so she took shelter in some corner. I dropped the vacuuming project and literally looked for her in every room in the house, closing all doors to bar any escape route.

However, as usual the dogs were heroes. Although they were in their crate, they started barking when they saw her, which revealed that she had actually been ensconced somewhere in her original hiding-corner, in the family room, the whole time. Ian and I played team-tag to capture her, and then Ian proposed that the dogs should receive some kind of treat for their good work. Then he reflected further: "maybe they were just paying us back for the Pad Thai."

The "Pad Thai" for which they were doubtless consciously re-paying us, dates back to last night, when I dropped a small carton of doggy-bag-status pad Thai on the floor, and engaged their services to clean it up.

There's nothing terribly remarkable about this story, but it's an excellent snapshot of the order and cohesiveness of home life on our proverbial ranch, on a random Saturday morning.

(November 12, 2011)