Oh, boy. Certain recent events remind me why I don’t have kids yet. Many people know that I completely love and adore my dog, Farley. He’s been with me through several rough times, numerous great times and an infinite number of hours just lounging around.

Yesterday was an absolute banner day for me and my pooch.  First, the hair on his ears had grown long so I decided to trim them. Let’s do a mental diagram for a second:

Michael + Scissors + Good Intentions + Dog = MEDIC!

Ok, not really a medic. Farley is an absolute dream of a dog. You can play with him, poke him, manhandle him and he’ll just look at you adoringly as he turns into a lump in front of you. Puppies love him because they get to crawl all over him. Babies love him because he’s not threatening.  Humans love him because it seems like he’s a human. So, I’m trimming his ears and I get the first one done, no problem. Yay! Now no spaghetti sauce in that ear when I give him a leftover snack! On to the second ear. I grab the lenght of hair and I started slowly cutting. And then it happend – * snip * YELP!  He looked at me like I had just destroyed his favorite toy. I had accidentally nicked my dog’s ear. I felt so bad and worried. I was at the point of becoming hysterical. It was just a small nick but I still drew blood. After a while, Farley forgot about it and went about doing Farley things. Me? I still feel guilty.

Secondly, Farley has gotten a little plump of late. We even switched him to weight reducing food and he’s still a tad chunky. This has been going on for about a year. His ideal weight is between 55-65 pounds. He was hovering around 80. I finally had an epiphany – I would use a measuring cup to measure out his food rather than the blue mug we had been using. Let’s see, use the one cup scoop and poor it into the big blue mug and…uh…and…and notice that it only fills the mug half way. We had inadvertently been feeding Farley twice as much food as he is supposed to be getting. Oh, boy. No wonder he’s shaped like a barrel.

Go ahead. All of you people who tell me that I should have kids, get up on your soap boxes and tell me to do it now. You’re all lucky we’re not a family of knife throwers…