Category Archives: Bean

>Rest In Peace Bean

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Thanks to everyone for your kind words about Bean today. We are all still pretty sad, and in my case, mildly hungover from our Irish wake last night.

Here is my eulogy if you didn’t get the email.

Almost 15 years ago, when Dave and I had been dating for four months he decided to get a dog. He needed to borrow a car from one of my roommates to get to the pound, but he didn’t want to take a bunch of girls with him for fear we’d pressure him into getting a dog that wasn’t exactly right but was sooooo cuuuuuute. We promised Dave we’d keep our opinions to ourselves so he’d let us come with him. There were two tiny puppies together in a cage, but Bean was much cuter and quieter than the other dog. And the other dog went right back inside while Bean just stared at us, silently. I remember that Dave was getting out his wallet, (to pay what? sixteen dollars, maybe?) and the animal control guy picked Bean up by the scruff of his neck and tossed him roughly into my arms. I had never held a dog before.

Bean was our first baby, and he taught us a little bit about what it would be like to be parents. In the last few months he taught us a about caring for someone at the end of their life. In the middle he was that crazy, somewhat neurotic roommate who got in trouble for things you wouldn’t dream of doing, but who was always there for you, and who always had your back.

We had a lot of good times, and we already miss him.

Rest in Peace, Bean
(February 1994 – October 15, 2008)

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>L’eggo My Lego

>This morning, it was my turn to do the day care drop off, and before Dave left he helped me make sure everyone was dressed, sunscreened, fed and ready for school. Then as he was leaving he noticed we only cleared half the dinner dishes. From the front porch. Classy! This is important to the story because I think some baby food dripped onto the floor when he was bringing dishes in. I hope it was baby food at least.

Dave was out the door on his bike, and I was making the first trip out to the garage to load up my bike. Pump, lunch, bottles, attach trailer to bike. On my way out the door I heard, “Ewww! Yuck! Ewww! What is that?! Eww!” It looked like a tiny drip of baby food. It was brown and gooey, so let’s just all agree that it was baby food. I said I would wipe it up in a second after I got back in from the garage because my hands were full.

Before I could finish attaching the trailer to the bike, Luke was at the door sobbing. “He ate it! Bean ate it!” The baby food? Sweet, problem solved. “NO! He ate my green lego! He ate it, and it’s gone and now I will never, ever, ever be able to make the castle again! I want you to get it out of him!” Hmm, well, yeah I can’t do that. I do suspect that the lego must have had baby food on it too, because Bean doesn’t really eat plastic unless it is wrapped around cheese, chocolate, tortillas, cookies, any other type of food, or garbage. And the baby food spot on the floor had disappeared too so at least I didn’t have to clean that up. But the really bad part was that I have been reading Parents magazine (aka 1001 ways your kids could die magazine) in the lactation room, so instead of saying, “That is what you get for not putting your toys away” or even “Hey, maybe leaving your legos on the floor is a bad idea!” I had to say, “Wow, I bet you are really sad that Bean ate your lego. I understand how you feel. I don’t like it when Bean eats my things either.” This was supposed to calm him down.

It didn’t work, of course and when we were 3 blocks away he mentioned that his teeth were covered in boogers from all the sobbing. I contemplated my options but I didn’t see any soft leaves around, and I didn’t want to use my shirt to clean him up, so I road home to get kleenex. Which he used to wipe the boogers off his teeth. Off. His. Teeth. I just threw up a little thinking about it.

Then we rode another block and I started trying to cheer him up by mentioning that today was field trip day! Yea! Field trip day! And that is when I remembered that I forgot the car seat. So I turned around and got the car seat. And then we rode the rest of the way to school and work and I got there sometime just slightly before lunch.

>Don’t Quote Me On This

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“Bean” was a pleasure to have. That is what it said on the note from the kennel. Dave wondered about the use of quotes around his name. I suggested that maybe the kennel thinks “Bean” is Bean’s nickname. But I really shouldn’t make fun of them for two reasons.

1.) I started to look up proper and improper uses of quotation marks to research this blog “article” that I am writing here. But then I got sort of lazy and decided to “give up”.
2.) I should probably have put quotes around the first sentence since I am quoting a line from the note from the kennel. Is that right? I don’t know – see point 1.

I should also not be making fun of the kennel because they let me take Bean without paying since I forgot my wallet. “Oh, we trust you! We’ll see you soon.”

Regardless, I think that a more accurate sentence would have been, Bean was a “pleasure” to have. Just “kidding” Bean!

In other Bean news:

Today I brushed Bean’s hair and got such a big pile of hair that I was thinking of taking it to someone I know who spins fiber into yarn and then weaves things out of the yarn and asking her to make Bean a dog hair sweater. I wish I could take credit for this fabulous “idea” but Dave and I have been joking about the “dog hair sweater” ever since I overheard that same person accepting a zip lock bag of dog hair and saying, “I can’t wait to work with this and see what kind of yarn I can make.”

Lastly, I thought a “funny” blog sidebar to have would be something along the lines of “Bean has gone N days without an accident in the house.” Where N=number of days. But then I realized that it would just be so depressing to keep resetting that number back to zero. On the other hand, I guess the number would go up more often than it would go down. And today we could be celebrating “1” day without an accident. Yea “Bean”!

Update: While I was dropping Luke off at daycare this morning, Bean ate a granola bar and a mocha clif shot (contains 50mg of caffeine). Dave is out of town, so if history tells me anything, I should be rolling up the rug and covering the floors and walls with plastic. (If I had been blogging at the time, I could now link to the “eating everything out of the refrigerator incident”, the “eating the care package from Beth incident”, the “eating a bag of chocolate chips and jumping out of the window and running away incident”, the “eating a bag of whole wheat flour incident”, the “eating a bag of brown sugar incident” and everyone’s favorite, the “eating a box of Malley’s Chocolate and you don’t even want to know the rest of the story incident”.)

>Appeasing Everyone

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After dinner, Dave was paged and had to work. Luke went to the bathroom, I put Bean out, and put Jack on the jiminy and started the dinner dishes. I heard a thud and then a yell so I ran to the bathroom with a tiny ice pack in one hand. Luke had hit his head on the bathroom sink and he was crying. I gave him the ice pack and a kiss and a hug, but he seemed determined to see how loud his cries could echo off the bathroom walls. Since I thought he was being overly dramatic, I told him to lie down in my bed for a minute and I would be back to check on him because now Jack was also crying. I picked Jack up and went to check on Luke, who was laying in my bed, still crying and holding the ice pack to his head. He said,

“I think I have a bump.”

So I immediately went into panic mode and ran, with Jack over my shoulder, to get a better ice pack. I came back with a bag of frozen peas. An open bag of frozen peas. I handed it to Luke, who looked skeptical. I said,

“Just try it and see how it feels. I’ll be back with something better, because now Bean is barking to be let in.”

So I ran, with Jack over my shoulder, to get a better ice pack and to let Bean in. On the way back to check on Luke I heard,

“Mommy?”

And I said,

“The peas.”

Bean was a big help with cleanup, but I am still finding peas after 2 days.

To prevent future injuries we came up with the following solution:

>Poor Bean

>Poor Bean. Since his 14th birthday he seems to be falling a lot more often. We have had so many incidents with him over the past 4 years and every time something happens we think, “Is this the end?” And I sob and sob and start planning his memorial service. And then he miraculously pulls through and we are so happy. And then he eats a bag of whole wheat flour out of the lazy susan and poops all over the dining room and we think, “huh.” And the cycle continues.

Last night Jack was laying on the jiminy and we were all sitting around staring at him with bated breath, waiting for him to roll over. This is a nightly occurrence now, and I think we’ll keep up this vigil until he does in fact roll over, or worse, we pick him up from daycare and find out that it happened there.

Bean thinks if we are all sitting around staring at, and loving something on the floor, it should be him, poor guy. So he keeps walking past, muttering under his breath. He can’t get too close because of the arches over the jiminy, but he managed to get close enough so that when he fell last night he landed almost on top of, but actually right next to Jack. Poor, poor bean. Because after the indignity of the fall he ended up with a handful of his fur in Jack’s iron grasp. I was about 24 inches away but I had to dive forward in slow motion with a “Noooooooooooooooooo” because I have had my hair in that grasp, and Dave has even had chest hair in the grasp and it hurts, hurts, hurts.

The Bean of yesteryear would have let out a scary growl. The Bean of 1994 might have even bitten someone. But Poor Bean made a noise that sounded like this, “You have got to be kidding me with this. Can someone get him away from me?”

Poor Bean.

(I have a great video of Jack not rolling over, but I am having technical difficulties uploading it. I hope to post it soon.)