Your Dog Is Not a Baby. But My Baby May Very Well Be a Dog.

When I first had Thalia, various child-free friends and neighbors tried to compare notes between my baby and their pets. I understand that they were just trying to relate. But when you’re fat and sleep deprived and freaking the hell out about your new life, the last thing you want to hear is that the baby you just carried for the longest 40 weeks of your life and then expelled forcefully from your person and with a moderate amount of pain is pretty much the same as the rat-like King Charles Spaniel down the hall who growls at shoes and licks his own balls.

Thalia is up all night – sometimes every hour. It’s driving me nuts.
Yeah, Buster was up all night too. It’s sooooo difffffficult.

Thalia swallowed a penny and I’m freaking out. I might have to take her to the doctor.
Oh I understand. I had to take CC to the vet when she ate a coffee bean.

Thalia is starting solids, we’re so excited!
Ziggy just tried a new dog food too!

You only think I’m exaggerating.

Truth be told, I probably would have done the same thing before I had kids. In fact, I think I did. Mea culpa.

But now suddenly I’m feeling more forgiving as I realize that Sage may, in fact be part canine.

The facts:

-Crawls around on all fours with toys with her mouth
-Finds toys under the couch them brings them to us
-Likes to have her belly rubbed
-Eats food off the floor
-Happy to pee on the living room floor
-Eats dog food
-Smelly farts

You be the judge.



On a separate note Sage is now sleeping through the night. (Yippee!) Thank you for all the
supportive comments and suggestions and thank you, anonymous anti-CIO internet trolls for sitting this one out. If only Thalia wasn’t getting up at midnight every night now and coming into bed with us. Gee, this parenting thing isn’t one big happy picnic all the time like they promised in the brochure, is it.

{41 Comments}

41 thoughts on “Your Dog Is Not a Baby. But My Baby May Very Well Be a Dog.”

  1. My mom used to always talk scornfully about her (much younger) co-teachers who had little babies: “All they talk about it getting the baby to sleep through the night like it’s the only thing that matters! ‘I’ never cared when you guys slept through the night.” After I had my own baby I finally I had to say to her: “yes mom, but you weren’t WORKING (outside the home) when you had all of us, it makes a difference.”Not that not working outside the home is a piece of cake, but it doesn’t necessarily require the same brain power as finishing your molecular biology PhD (like I’m trying to do.)Yay for sleeping through the night!!! Go Sage!

  2. P.S. Actually, I’m sure she’s just completely forgotten how terrible the lack of sleep was… they say that sleep is important for establishing memories, after all.

  3. Oh that is beautiful and just why I had to leave small animal practice. YOUR dog is NOT your child. So now I spend my days with my arm up a cow’s butt. Am I happier. You bet!

  4. It really annoys me when people say that their pets are their babies! I could seriously go off about it for 20 minutes, but I won’t. (I’ll save that rant for my in-laws who compare my babies to their dog.)And I think Sage is cuter than that dog any day of the week!! (no matter what her ‘canine’ habits may be.)

  5. They tag team you. My older son decided to have night terrors for 3months on end just after we got the baby to sleep through the night. So basically, between the teething and whatnot, I didn’t sleep for three years.The good news is that you DO forget just how awful it was, given time.

  6. Persuasive argument…And yeah, it is a bit annoying when people go on about their “fur babies.” I mean, ew, for one thing, but also no. Dogs are DOGS.

  7. So long as she doesn’t eat her own vomit you’re good to go or worse, poop. Although, the whole crate for an entire day thing doesn’t seem half bad these days.

  8. I so hate the pet/child comparison, if only because I’m jealous that people can board their pets. And congrats on Sage’s sleeping – but the joy (ahem) of having two is that when one of them stops driving you crazy, the other one is happy to step in.

  9. Oh come on, Sage is WAY cuter than that dog! 🙂Besides, kids eventually learn to say “Mama, I love you”, and no matter how great a dog is, they can’t do that.

  10. hilarious! thanks for the laugh! btw, your little one is totally cuter than the dog LOL I understand how one could confuse the two though 🙂

  11. Oh, this is funny. Literally the last blog I visited, seconds before yours, was about spacing out vaccinations. And I commented about how when I worked for a vet, the vet wouldn’t give more than one vaccine a month to dogs and cats. Long story short, I <>have<> kids and I am apparently still doing this. Oh, the shame.

  12. Don’t start worrying until her main form of vocalization is barking.Actually, you might want to worry before that. I think the barking-instead-of-talking thing was what prompted my parents to take me to a therapist.

  13. When it’s time to pick your nursing home, this post will come back to haunt you.😉Why would you bring a dog to the vet for swallowing a coffee bean?

  14. While my kids couldn’t actually like their privates, the younger one used to chew on her toes like they were rawhide.Maybe she is part Doberman. She’s awfully fiesty.

  15. My son chewed on shoes so much that we took to locking them up. Seriously. Then I was at the pet store one day getting something for our fishtank and I noticed the rawhide. I gave it some real consideration.

  16. Well, one way to look at it is that only one of them will need to have their poop picked up by you every day until they croak. Tell that to the ankle biter mommies the next time. 😀I have a giant dog and it is sometimes hard to distinguish between canine and human with all the drooling and skill at spreading food and dirt everywhere.

  17. Too funny.I am right there with you re: the comparing my kids to your pets thing. Drives me nuts. People can leave their pets at home when they go out! If you do that with your kids, you get arrested. It’s not the same.

  18. Yay for another great post!!! I think my son is more dog-like than our dog sometimes. Now that he’s teething he’s taken to chewing on our shoes. I adopted my dog from the pound five years ago and she’s never chewed any of our shoes.

  19. I seem to have lost my glossy parenting brochure somewhere.Hooray for sleeping through the night!

  20. Not to worry – my daughter used to sleep with a rubber dog bone. It was the only toy she wanted in her crib. Dolls? No. Rattles? No. Stuffed animals? Absolutely not.Only the rubber dog bone would do.Non-parenting friends were horrified that I’d let her sleep with it. (I did wash it, of course.)Other parents of babies understood. Whatever helps baby sleep, baby gets. She’s now three, and insists on sleeping with books.

  21. My toddler is nothing like my dogs. The dogs are SOOOOO much easier.although..both the baby and the terrier have a whole litany of allergies and talk in their sleep (loudly)And neither the baby nor the hound sleeps and both scream.So maybe……..

  22. I totally just compared my cats to my friend’s 2-week-old baby. And I know better! My only excuse is that one-sided conversations are really awful for everyone involved: “The baby wakes up a lot.”“Oh.”“…”“…” “The baby just found her feet.”“Cool.”“…”“…”As a non-parent speaking to new parent, it’s always a balancing act.

  23. Six years of interrupted sleep around these parts. Nothing takes it toll like getting up 3 times a night (or more when they are younger) to talk your 4 year old back to bed. He finally stopped and man, I love sleep!

  24. The doggy phase, the crawling into bed every night phase (that’s been going on for like 2 years for us…) and now the crying for 1/2 hour because daddy ate a strawberry phase. Ahh, the joys of children. Still like ’em better than my dogs (bad pet-owner, bad).

  25. I am a 36 year old computer programmer who opted to be stay at home dad to 3 wonderful boys aged 6, almost 5 and a two and half year old while the better half is doing her Masters in Business. We ended up with a 3rd while trying for a girl – strong male genes didn’t allow that I guess. Anyways my point being that my senior most baby is my 7+ year old yellow lab (who will incidentally remain my “ONLY girl”) who taught me the real meaning of love and patience via house-breaking, canine training, picking up after her yada yada. Bottomline is that we all very peacefully co-exist and each one takes good care of the other. I always tend to remember the saying that someone once said to me – “Little things affect little minds”. Peace.

  26. Anon 3:08 I always remember the saying “little things make the best blog posts” Too bad I think like a writer and not a Buddhist. Life might be easier.

  27. There are three birthdays in my husband’s family in May, including mine. They celebrate all those birthdays on Mother’s Day. My husband’s aunt suggested that we also celebrate her Rat Terrier’s, Sheba, that day because May is HER birthday month as well.This from the woman who didn’t want to put her “baby” in a kennel after nipping at a 2-year-old, since it was “Sheba’s house, too.”i really like your blog! i just found it today as a google suggestion. It was a good suggestion. i heart funny/honest mommy-bloggers. Keep it up!

  28. Tee hee!Your baby wins hands-down.(I find pugs a little creepy, actually.)We are guilty of treating our cat like baby before we had kids…seems a little bizarre now.

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