Dog is our co-pilot

Like every other wife/mother who's trying to maintain and build a career, I find myself with a gross excess of free time and a desperate need to be responsible for keeping one more creature alive. This is where a typographical setting for sarcasm would come in very, very handy.

But I must admit, it was my idea to get the puppy. That in and of itself is odd, as I'm really a horse woman first, a cat woman at a very close second and a dog fan only when there's nothing to watch on my 800 channels other than "Judging Amy" reruns and agility competitions on Animal Planet. Don't get me wrong, I do love dogs, but I love dogs that don't kiss too much, demand attention, smell bad, shed, aggravate my cat, relieve themselves indoors or bark. In other words, I love cats.

But when I went over to my neighbors' house to see their litter of border collie puppies, I fell in love with a little girl with an adorable black spot in the middle of the white blaze running down her face. Fast forward a month and the puppy known temporarily as Dot is snoozing in my back yard as Riley snoozes upstairs. Both are entirely too young to play well together, so I really can't make the claim that we got the dog for Riley.

Granted, she loves to watch the pup attempt to herd me around the backyard, but Dot is in the gnawing on everything phase, and babies are no exception. So it's not like they keep each other busy so I can write. Instead, I find myself getting up before the sun to the let the puppy out to pee, then I go upstairs to change the diaper of the blue-eyed alarm clock that's just starting to go off. Then I mix up breakfast for each after I've had coffee so I'm sure I didn't confuse the baby formula with the puppy formula, and both of my girls get their breakfast.

The rest of the day is a staggered schedule of naps and play with both separately and five seconds of work in between. I'm falling asleep at 9 p.m. after researching Scottish lore and Gaelic names so that my husband and I can find a moniker we both like for the newest member of our family. We've got it narrowed down to Bailey and Kelpie; hopefully I'll have one picked by the time we get to the vet this afternoon.

As I told my aunt yesterday, if I didn't have a baby, I'd think this puppy was a lot of work. But despite the extra effort, I'm madly in love with this little dog.