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The yelling house

Last week we got a puppy.

One of the boys' favorite books is Audrey Wood's The Napping House. In it, a peaceful, sleeping house is transformed by a flea, a wakeful flea! And us, too. We've been transformed by 10 pounds of wiggling puppiness.

He's part Border Collie, part Australian Shepherd, and part Blue Heeler. In other words, a tremendous combination of instinct and temperament for herding sheep or cattle. But what we have instead of ducks or geese or lambs or calves, are 3 young boys with no desire to be held in a bunch or pushed through a gate.

It doesn't help matters that we can't decide on a name. Max? Sam? Jack? Bad Dog?

We'd had a difficult enough time choosing a name for our children: we are the parents who named their twins based on a remark by our ultrasound technician, who explained that for clarity, the babies would be referred to as Baby A and Baby B throughout the pregnancy. My husband Tom and I took that protocol to heart, and named our boys Avery and Bennett.

When we picked up the puppy, we made the exchange at a gas station on the side of the highway. He was in the back seat, on a blue tarp, and had vomited from car sickness. The woman meeting us held in her arms a young, dimpled baby. I asked hopefully, "Does he have a name?" The woman thought I meant her baby; I was asking about the dog.

Having a puppy in the house reminds me of the few facts I know about toddlers: that they have a particular, focused type of willpower that makes my own seem like a pale, wilted thing; that they have the cunning and intelligence to get themselves into trouble, but haven't yet developed the ability to get out of it; that you can pack a lot of running and jumping and hopping and eating and pooping into a single day, if you put your mind to it.

I'm reminded too of a parenting site I found when my first son Carter was little. There, I learned that small children are better able to respond to commands telling them what they should do, as opposed to what they shouldn't do. I finally realized this after a long morning of yelling, "NobitenobitenobiteNO!nobarknojump...YOU! GO LIE DOWN!"

The puppy is black and white and a shade of gray that looks blue in the sunlight. He let out his first bark and it sounded like the call of a lovesick rooster, or a beginner's attempt at yodeling. He chews the kids' rubber rain boots, the gloves, the Legos and the Imaginext Battle Castle, even the flashcards.

Avery calls him "baby." When the puppy ruins their toys, Avery says, "Baby time out." Or, "Baby nap time." He follows the puppy around the house and I hear him issuing reprimands: No! No! My sweet Avery, now the bossy one. Who would have guessed it?

Avery has always been the smallest, and he was the last to learn to walk and talk, because he has Down syndrome. Though he's the middle child, in many ways we treat him like the baby of the family. The puppy has changed the pecking order around here: Avery is no longer on the bottom.

At night, the puppy sleeps on each of the boys' beds, taking turns. If I wake, as I sometimes do, and wander from room to room, ending in the kitchen (making sure the stove is off) to the back door (double checking), sometimes even taking a step outside to look at the stars, the puppy climbs down from the warm piles of comforters and covers and sleeping boys, and follows me. When I return to my own bed, he puts his head in my lap and looks up at me with his golden eyes and my heart melts.

There will be no more babies for us. Once, this thought would have sent me to tears, but no longer. I'm happy with the size and shape of our family, each member as important and essential as another. We fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the picture of our lives becoming more and more clear with each passing day.

This is the season of puppies and little boys, a time that is not quite bottles and diapers, but puppy chow and tiny piddle stains hidden in corners. We settle on a name: Bailey. Avery still calls him Baby, but it's close enough that nobody seems to mind.

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