I am so consumed by a mental loop of HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE you would not even know that there are other elements to my life. I am looking forward to this part being over and the next part being well under way. There is no way to get to the next part without doing this part.

Today’s plan was watch episodes of The West Wing while playing the three (3) versions of Candy Crush I have on my phone, and pack two boxes between each episode. This should have resulted in a 2/1 ratio of boxes to episodes. Would you like to guess what the actual ratio is? In my partial defense, I allowed one substitution: making a scary phone call instead of packing two boxes. Counting the call as two boxes, I am at a ratio of 2/3, which makes me glad I converted the call into boxes before telling you.

What is my problem? What IS my problem?? I am stressed about packing and about all the packing that still needs to be done! Doing some packing would help with that! Also my hands and feet are freezing and the best way to fix that is to move around a little, maybe lift something heavy like a box. Instead I watched a third episode of West Wing and then walked across the house and sat down at my computer.

It’s discouraging how MANY boxes it takes. I packed the bedding and I used the largest boxes and it took three of those large boxes and I haven’t yet even packed all the bedding. Why do we have so much bedding? Are we USING all this bedding? Maybe I should open those boxes back up and get rid of more of the bedding.

I can’t even tell how much progress I’m making. The box pile is certainly getting large. But the house looks discouragingly the same. Am I a tenth of the way done? A hundredth? WHO CAN TELL.

I find I am no longer particularly stressed about the idea of living in a different house, or the idea of giving up this house. I can still get myself worked up about either thing if I try, but I can’t sustain it. I’m looking forward to living in the new house. I don’t need anymore the fiction that we will hang onto this house in case we want to move back. But I am not looking forward to all the calls and strangers involved in a new house.

One of my least favorite parts is not knowing who to call for what. Like, just for an example, the home inspector said that there is a place where a plumber removed too much of a support beam in order to make room for a pipe, and that situation needs to be remedied. Who do I call for that? What verb is it I’m even asking them for, other than “to remedy”? How do I figure out what kind of worker to hire when I don’t even know what kind of work needs to be done? Is there someone I could call and just hand them the inspection report and have them take care of it all without me having to make a whole bunch of calls? And if not, WHY NOT?? This seems like an opportunity just waving itself around in the air! “Hand me the inspection report and I will take care of it.” Or maybe there already are such people, but they are called contractors and they cost the same as buying an additional house, and that is why I am not hearing so much about them as the obvious answer to this problem. WHY ARE WE EVEN BUYING A HOUSE, WHAT A STUPID IDEA TO OWN A HOUSE.

Basically that is where I have put my stress about moving: into freaking out about fixing problems that have evidently been coasting along just fine for a couple of decades. I did search online for “handyman” with our city name, and I have found someone in a larger city about 40 minutes away who not only does general handyman work of a “no task too small” variety but also helps with moves and furniture assembly. So probably I have already solved my own problem and can get back to watching episodes of The West Wing now.

I am attempting to apply for home insurance for the new house, and I am so frustrated. I just put all that frustration on Twitter so let’s just use that as a summary:

Anyway it’s not going well. Do MOST people know the year their 200-year-old home’s heating system was converted from fireplace to oil? And why are they asking if we have at least 60 feet of perimeter fencing? And why do they want to know how many rooms have crown molding? And why do they set up an online-quote form if you CANNOT GET AN ONLINE QUOTE FROM IT??

Also, in order to fill out parts of the form, I had to consult the inspection report. There is nothing that gets me quite so wound up as an inspection report. “Here are the ONE THOUSAND PAPER CUTS you will die of if you buy this house!” But I remember feeling the same way when we bought this house, and I remember we fixed the major things and the rest of it just became the house we lived in. Like, yes, we should probably touch up the paint on that step. But we haven’t, and it’s fine.

I would like to express appreciation for what appears to be a shift to the term “home insurance.” I never knew where to put the apostrophe in homeowners/homeowner’s/homeowners’ insurance. Plus, “home insurance” is parallel to “car insurance”.

I am wearing HIGH-TOP Converse sneakers for the first time, and I love them. I love them. I can’t believe I went so many years assuming I would hate them and not even trying them.

I wear the low-tops all spring and summer, and every fall I get sad because my feet start getting too chilly and I have to switch to something else. Last year I got some thin wool-blend socks and that extended the Converse Season, but I wondered if the high-tops would extend the season even further, and I finally got myself to buy a pair on a good sale. Then I let them sit in the box on my bureau for a month, feeling shy about even trying them on, even though there’s a 30-day free-return policy so the sensible person would try them on right away. But no, I let the return window close and THEN panicked and put them on this morning and they’re great. They’re GREAT. I love them. Thank goodness.

I don’t know if they’ll be warm enough for late fall and winter, but they are definitely cozier. I’d thought I would hate the feeling of them snugged around my ankles but I love it. I have weak arches and tricksy ankles, and the snugginess makes me feel more secure and stable.

BY THE WAY: if you wear Converse but haven’t bought any for a few years, be aware that the sizing seems to have changed. I have a whole heap of old Converse sneakers, all size 11 women’s (9 men’s), so when I finally ordered some new ones, I ordered size 11 without even thinking about it—and they were significantly too large. In disbelief (they were the SAME SIZE) and wondering if it could just be that my old ones were worn-in and laced more tightly, I tried wearing a pair anyway, and I kept tripping over the toes. Happily I’d tried THOSE pairs on before the 30-day return window, so I sent them all back. I then went to a fairly distant store that sells Converse and I tried on other sizes. Pair after pair, just to be sure. And sure enough: now I wear a size 10 women’s. Converse was bought by Nike a few years ago, and they seem to have changed the sizing around then.

ALSO. I do not know if you are aware of this or if it would relevant to your interests, but there are HELLO KITTY Converse. I have these on my Christmas wish list:

(image from Converse.com)

No real update on the move: we’re still sort of twiddling our thumbs and waiting for Closing Day. I’ve packed a few more boxes and I think that process is gathering steam now. Edward, a child inclined toward charmingly oblivious observations, said with wonderment “I never knew we had SO MANY BOXES!” He apparently thought I had pulled these giant piles of moving boxes out of some secret storage place in the house, rather than acquiring them recently for this exact purpose.

Two major moving milestones: (1) Yesterday I packed the first box. (2) Today I ordered new return-address labels.

Both of these are still a little risky, because the closing (when the house officially becomes ours) isn’t until later next month. But this week has marked the end of the uncertainty period for us as buyers. There were things we had to have evaluated/inspected as part of our offer, and then the seller had to accept/decline what we asked them for as a result of those evaluations/inspections, and so things could easily have fallen through on either side: we could have found something we weren’t willing to deal with at all (“We’re sorry to back out but the inspector said the walls are at least 80% termite at this point”); or we could have asked the seller to handle something and the seller could have declined to do so, and that too could have ended the deal. (I have heard from friends who live elsewhere that it is not common in those places to ask sellers to fix things. Where I live, it’s assumed that the asking price of the house reflects a house that is safe and usable; if anything in the house is not safe or not usable, and that thing hasn’t been disclosed ahead of time as something already taken into account when setting the asking price, it’s common for the seller to agree to handle/fix it or else give a credit or partial-credit at closing for the cost of handling/fixing it. But it would not be common for sellers to fix anything cosmetic or relatively minor: broken fence, painting, broken interior doorknob. We are talking more along the lines of fixing faulty electricity, a broken water heater, a dangerous furnace, etc.)

But we said what we wanted handled/fixed/credited, and the seller agreed to those things, and we all signed our names. It looks to me as if our part is now pretty much over, except for all the packing and cleaning and moving and paper-signing and address-changing and utilities and insurance and everything else. But we don’t seem to have very many pre-closing things to do, if any. The seller has to work on the fixes they’ve agreed to do, and as long as they DO do those fixes, I don’t see any particular reason to think things would fall through at this point. Our hope is that the fixes will be done briskly: both parties agreed informally ahead of time that if possible we’d all enjoy closing earlier than originally scheduled.

And so that seemed to be my cue to pack a box or two. I geared up for it: I had coffee and scrambled eggs, and I told myself I could watch ONE episode of West Wing while I ate, and then when that was over I had to pack a box. It was a good first box-packing, too: I packed up quite a bit of a closet. It’s the closet where I keep things such as gift bags, tissue paper, gifts I bought for a specific someone and then forgot about, gifts I bought for an unspecified someone and then never found the right person, gifts I bought to have on hand if one of the kids suddenly got invited to a party, etc. While I did pack a lot of it, I got rid of more than I packed. It was a little painful, yet satisfying and refreshing. Like peeling surgical tape off the skin when it’s been there a couple of days. I donated:

• every gift bag I didn’t like

• any specific-someone gift that no longer seemed like a good idea

• any unspecified-someone gift that had been there more than a couple of years

• every kid-birthday-party gift that was for an age group younger than my youngest kid

• two Target bags of fabric ribbon, bought on clearance long ago when I thought I might be someone who would wrap gifts in hemmed fabrics and reusable cloth ribbons

• a dozen decorative reusable gift boxes purchased on clearance during that same deluded stage

• two Target bags of disposable gift bows and ribbons I hardly ever use because our cats try to eat them; I kept one spool because I do very occasionally use it for a craft or for a gift I’m giving outside our household, and so if I don’t keep some I’ll have to go out and buy more and that would be galling

Long ago I read a book on hoarding, and the one thing I remember about it (other than my rapidly-reached conclusion that I may be someone who likes to save things but in no way do I qualify as an actual hoarder) is that the most painful moment of getting rid of something is RIGHT BEFORE your hand lets go of it. That is, they asked hoarders to throw something away, and they would have the person evaluate their level of stress and pain as they held the item over the trash or donation barrel, and the person would be right up there at 9 or 10—weeping with reluctance to get rid of the thing, thinking they couldn’t bear to get rid of it. Then they asked the person again about five minutes after the item had been disposed of, and the person would rate their stress and pain at around a 1 or 2, or even a 0. I found this very useful when getting rid of those gorgeous and totally unused gift boxes. They’re so pretty! They’re so sturdy! But I’m not using them for ANYTHING. I’ve kept them for years in case I could think of a use! But I have not thought of a use! Let’s set those pretty things free in the world for someone else who CAN find a use for them!

…Where was I? Oh, yes: I packed a box. Just the one box.

Today I have packed two more boxes. I keep getting stuck, is one problem. Like, I start to pack up the books, and realize a lot of the books aren’t mine to decide if we’re keeping them or not. Or I realize I don’t have enough smallish boxes for packing books, and need to get more from the liquor store (my friend Morgan got me two huge batches of moving boxes from people in her neighborhood, so Small Boxes for Heavy Things is the only gap I need to fill). Or I wonder can we possibly get rid of Paul’s dozen box sets of DVDs, now that it’s been nearly a decade since we had a DVD player?—but I guess I should ask him and not assume. Or I think, “Can I pack the winter coats, or does that guarantee an early cold snap?” And so on. But I did pack two more boxes.

And I ordered the address labels. That’s a practical thing (it’s nice to have them for one million change-of-address purposes) but also a celebratory one: I remember when we moved to this house, it was a very exciting stage of the process. If the sale were to fall through, I would be out a little bit of money, but it’s not enough of a risk to be worth waiting. And it was a lot of fun to choose. Go on and guess how many of the four sets I entered our CURRENT address on, before realizing it. (It was all four.)

Smallish things I wish:

1. That my microwave, which beeps three times every thirty seconds or so when it is done microwaving, would do that ONLY on a special Coffee Re-Heating setting. I DO need to be reminded that my coffee mug is in there. I DON’T need to be reminded about ANYTHING ELSE.

2. That our realtor would EMAIL us updates instead of always CALLING us. We ALWAYS contact her by email. We have TOLD her we prefer email, more than once. We even made an accidental passive-aggressive point about it by praising the home inspector for emailing us back, saying how annoying it was to us when we email someone and then they call us or email back a phone number—and then realizing that with the realtor standing right there it was kind of an awkward thing to be discussing in front of her. But apparently there was no need for us to cringe, because she still calls us.

3. That I had more than two things for this list. It seemed like a good idea for a post when I’d thought of two, but I’ve been sitting here half an hour and nothing else is occurring to me. Perhaps you could add some smallish things YOU wish, so it seems more like a discussion-starter and less like a stunted topic.

May I recommend taking leftover Chinese food and adding it to scrambled eggs? SO GOOD. The best egg-addition so far, I think, is leftover Kung Pao Chicken: the chicken, the celery, the peppers, even the peanuts—plus don’t forget to put in the sauce. It coats the eggs just perfectly. And put in a spoonful of leftover rice too. Then eat until you feel sick because it is so delicious you can’t stop.

I have for whatever reason stopped being super-anxious about the new house and also stopped being super-sad about leaving this house. It took about two weeks—and also I had to say to Suddenly-Cold-Footed Paul that we could think seriously one more time about backing out, but after that we needed to stop thinking of it as an option or I was going to lose my mind.

Now I am regular anxious (“So much to do!” “What if the utilities at the new house are so high it makes us cry?” “We are going to have to figure out what to do about X and Y…and W and B and Q”) and regular sad (“All the things we had done to this house thinking we’d be here maybe forever!” “I remember washing this wall when I was 32 weeks pregnant with William” “The next person is not going to love this weird Frankenkitchen the way I do”), plus a nice amount of excited and enthusiastic. I am planning multiple New House events: having my wine-and-appetizers group over to drink a toast in every room; having extended family over for pizza and a tour and a game of Sardines; maybe a more general housewarming where we invite everybody we know for cocktails and snacks (do people still do housewarmings?). It’s going to be fun. It’s good to do new things. I am going to say it until I believe it. It’s already working a little!

Let me tell you a story: This afternoon my four remaining housechildren came home from school, and a short time later the eldest of those children drove the younger three to an afternoon activity on his way to work, and I am alone in the house once again, having exerted no childcare effort since they left for school this morning. I am looking back over my shoulder at the days when my days were so full of childcare I would daydream about getting sent to a hospital or maybe prison, and now here I am getting another cup of coffee and queuing up another episode of West Wing. (I’m re-watching it from the beginning.)

I have been watching a lot of TV while playing phone games. I’m not watching new things: I’m re-watching, because I need more distraction than playing phone games, and I need more distraction than watching new TV, but playing phone games while watching new TV is too much. Phone games plus re-runs is perfect. This is to distract me from the stress of the maybe-house and maybe-move, which grow increasingly less “maybe.”

You might wonder if my time might be better spent packing or at least cleaning and organizing and de-cluttering, and I too wonder that. Why am I not doing that, when packing/cleaning/organizing/de-cluttering would make me feel better by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done, rather than by distracting me from it? Psychology is such a rich tapestry.

I have also been re-watching Northern Exposure. Joel Fleischman is extremely my type. I remember arguments among peers: who is cuter, Ed or Chris? It’s interesting how much younger Holling and Maurice look to me now, twenty-plus years after I first watched the series. I’m not sure if that makes me MORE or LESS squicked now by the “two men in their 60s fighting over an 18-year-old girl plotline”; I think it’s a draw. Maggie continues to be as hopelessly aspirational to me as was/is the French girl in the movie Better Off Dead, and I love Marilyn and Ruth-Anne as much as ever. Anyway it’s not too late to ditch this Big Old House in Town life option and switch to a Cabin in Alaska life option.

Update on the Possible Move is this: AFTER Paul pushed for this house and this move, to the point where I thought “I would need to Really Hate this house in order to stand in his way on this,” and AFTER we made an offer, THAT’S when Paul joined me on Anxiety Island. Suddenly he was all “Do we really want to do this???” and “Is this really how we want to spend our money???” and “Do we even WANT to move???” Oh good.

I am trying to think about it like this: I BADLY WANTED each pregnancy/baby—but there were times during each pregnancy that I had misgivings or even panic about the pregnancy/baby/decision. A wanted baby is still a huge life-changing upheaval, and there are so many unknowns about the particular child, and there can be fears such as “What if I don’t love this child as much as my first child?” and “What if later we wish we’d stopped one baby sooner?,” and there can be stressful feelings about the upcoming delivery, and so on and so on. I would not at those times have wanted someone to say to me “YOU are the one who wanted this!!”

I continue to have my own panicky feelings about the house and the move and all the million stressful things that go along with a move. I can swing wildly between “THIS IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND WE NEED TO GET OUT OF IT” and “This is fine and it’s a fun adventure and it’s a great opportunity to go through all our stuff!” in, like, a five-minute period of time. I’m using a lot of lavender-vanilla-scented stuff—it’s supposed to be calming. I’m also using a fair amount of gin.

It helps me to think about things such as these:

1. When I play computer games, I have a tendency to hoard the boosters or money or whatever, and/or I play the game on the most efficient mode, even when neither of those things are the FUN-maximizing way to play the game. Sometimes I will spend real actual money to buy coins/tickets/whatever for the game, so that I can get the cooler stuff—and then I hoard those forever and never use them on the cooler stuff because I can’t figure out what I most want to spend them on. Later I lose interest in the game and stop playing it, leaving all those boosters and coins/tickets/whatever behind. That is not what I want to do with ACTUAL LIFE. I don’t want to stay in our current house forever just because it’s not efficient to move, or just because it will cost some boosters/coins. Eventually I will no longer be playing this game, and I’d rather not abandon it with all those boosters/coins unused.

2. This house represents a Fun Different Life Mode to Try: it’s “Living in a Big Old Historical House in Town” mode. There are a number of things that will be quite different about our life, including being able to walk to a bunch of places we currently drive to. I think it’s possible/likely that this will result in us participating in more town events, since we’ll be Right There and can just stroll over, instead of having to think about it and make plans and find parking and so forth. If we do get a dog, that too will be an interesting new life mode. And we might get chickens. And Paul is doing a lot of research on the new house and finding out interesting historical stuff; owning an old house might make us both more interested in town history and give us a new hobby. And if we try this new life mode and it’s not for us, we can change it again: it’s still fun/interesting to have tried a few different ways of living over the course of a lifetime.

3. We’ve moved before and it always seems unbelievably overwhelming but it always gets done and then everything calms down and gets normal again.

4. Lots of people change houses a lot more frequently than us, and it’s no big deal. Like, they just move! It’s a normal life thing! They don’t get THIS STRESSED about it! Perhaps I too could dial it back a bit!

5. My friend Morgan LOVES so many aspects of moving, and her enthusiasm is very bolstering. She says things like, “I want to come over and help you pack!!” and “I want to see the new house and talk about FURNITURE!!” She sees the whole things as an Interesting Project, and that helps me to see it that way too.

6. My friend Surely is in love with the house, and her enthusiasm is also very bolstering. She looks at the photos and says things like, “I am OBSESSED with x!!” and “Ooo, what is that door across from the sink??” It makes me love the house more.

7. My friend Melissa is a calmer, more sensible version of me: we have enough personality overlap to empathize strongly with each other, but she doesn’t get as FREAKED by things. So she can say things that make total sense to my brain, but with her own steadier spin on it. Plus, she and her family have lived in several old houses. She says things like, “Your current house is great, but it’s in a bad location. The new house is in a much nicer location and will be easier to sell—either in a few years if you don’t end up liking it, or when you get old and have to sell it” and “We’ve lived in old houses that haven’t been anywhere near as updated as this one; this one will be way easier to deal with.”

8. This could be a fun adventure for Paul and me to do together. We don’t have many shared interests, but we’re both riveted by this house and the possibilities. We’ve talked to each other more in the last two weeks than in the last year, I think. And we’re already making plans to walk to each newly-walkable-to restaurant in turn.

9. A LOT of the current stress is based purely on dealing with the realtor and the seller and the various evaluators and all the other unfamiliar people and processes and decisions involved in transferring a house from one owner to another, and all of that is going to go away soon.

10. As moves go, this is a nice easy one. We are not even moving to a different town. It’s the SAME town, the SAME school system. We don’t have to figure out new school, new doctors, new dentist, new grocery store, new friends, new library; we don’t have to have records transferred or figure out new utilities.

11. This is all very stressful but it’s not Really Bad Life Thing stress. It’s just CHANGE stress.

I have had to call our insurance company four times in the past two weeks about three separate issues. All ended up getting fixed, and I must say our insurance company has very nice customer service representatives, but this is new insurance for us as of six months ago and this is a nervous-making number of mistakes to have to catch and deal with.

Today Henry was supposed to have his allergy testing, and tomorrow an appointment with the doctor to decide what to do next. Instead the office called 90 minutes before the appointment to reschedule those two appointments for (1) a week from now and (2) MORE THAN TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, respectively. This is a significant and demoralizing setback. I am trying to see it big-picture-style as the blip it is, but I don’t mind telling you I had Cry Voice on the phone as she gave me the new dates.

A possible move update is that we decided to try to buy the house. We put in an offer contingent on something being fixed, so we thought we might very well lose the house to another buyer who would make an offer without the accompanying demand. But the seller accepted our offer. Our agent told us the seller can still start the process of fixing that thing, discover it is more expensive/involved than expected, and dissolve the contract without penalty. Also we are getting the house inspected, and we may find things during that process that we don’t like, in which case we too are allowed to dissolve the contract without penalty. This is why I say we decided to TRY to buy the house: I don’t want to feel as if it’s a done deal when there are still a lot of places where this could fall through.

I am almost entirely consumed now by house-related stress. Right now I am mostly coping by Not Thinking About It Too Much, which is also good in case it falls through (or in case it doesn’t fall through). I’m getting each thing done one at a time. Here I am, writing the escrow check, that’s all, nothing to do with any ENORMOUS HOUSE PURCHASE or anything. Here I am, writing the inspection appointment on the calendar, no big deal, nothing to do with anything that might happen next.

Here is what I would like to discuss in a distracting-from-home-purchase way: dog breeds. I have grown up with ONLY cats, and in fact none of my childhood FRIENDS even had dogs. (This was not on purpose.) I realize that dogs are individuals, but also I am given to understand that breed plays a big role, so that certain breeds are certain ways and you shouldn’t get a dog of that breed if those are traits you don’t like, even though each individual dog of that breed might have those characteristics to a lesser or greater extent. But, like, certain breeds Tend To Be more energetic and certain breeds Tend To Be less energetic, and so on. Am I getting this approximately right so far?

What I think might be fun/useful would be for me to say what basic variety of dog I am hoping to find, and have people yell out breeds that seem like a good match for some/all of the traits. Or say anything else about dogs. Let’s just talk about dogs in general for awhile. Like, don’t feel you have to have relevant advice in order to join the talking about dogs.

Paul says he doesn’t want a dog that, if he (Paul) were to strike a dignified pose near a forest, would make him look ridiculous. By this he means Corgis, Dachshunds, Basset Hounds, and anything small and fancy. His own preference is for a dog the size and basic dog-look (possibly not temperament—he doesn’t know anything about dogs either) of a Labrador Retriever or Golden Retriever or German Shepherd. (Do we capitalize dog breed names? I don’t even know that. It looks wrong either way I do it.)

But I don’t think we care very much what Paul wants. He technically has veto power but I’m planning to ignore even that, unless he gets very vigorous about it. This is MY dog. And I very much like the sort of dog that would make Paul look ridiculous if he tried to strike a dignified pose next to one. Dachshunds, Corgis, Basset Hounds. I will agree that I am disinclined toward the Small and Fancy category (Small But Not Fancy is fine), even though in many ways those seem like they’d be a good starter dog: it seems like they’re more cat-like, plus they’re small which seems more manageable. But they don’t appeal so far. Don’t let that stop you from recommending them: I am keeping all the possibilities open at this point.

The type of dog I have said over the years is my favorite, the type I would choose if I knew for a fact that it was something I could handle on all the levels a dog will need to be handled, is a Great Dane. But…I mean, they’re huge. HUGE. Does a person go from “no dogs at all” to “100-150 pounds of dog” like that? And how much would a person end up spending on dog food?? LOTS, I’m guessing. And what if I were walking the dog and it decided to take off suddenly? I very much doubt I could stop it from dragging me through the fields. It just seems like SO MUCH DOG. It might be better to start with something more medium-sized. I guess it turns out I’m PICTURING something more medium-sized, when I picture My Dog.

It is my impression that it is better to get a mixed-breed dog, is that right? Not only because of the cost (I have seen purebred puppies selling for multiple thousands of United States dollars EACH), but also I have heard that purebreds are more likely to have breed-specific health issues, whereas a mixed-breed dog is a sturdier creature—but I’m not sure how true that is. Also I’m not sure if there might be a difference between “purebred” (as in, a very expensive dog that is 100% a certain breed) and a dog that is, say, just Labrador Retriever but NOT a purebred (like, it might have some other dogs in its ancestry and you wouldn’t use it as a show dog, but if someone asked you what it was you’d just say Labrador Retriever).

Well. Okay, let me get to the part where I tell you what I would like. For my very first dog I would like an EASY dog. I want an adult dog, not a puppy. I would like a LAZY dog that is willing to go on walks or maybe play outside a little with the kids, but isn’t super-active otherwise. Do they ALL stop every few seconds to sniff things on walks, or is that something some dogs do a lot more than others? I would prefer LESS stopping, if there’s a choice. I would prefer a dog on the low end of drooling. I would like a QUIET dog, disinclined to bark; it’s okay if they bark when someone comes up the driveway, or if they bark a little while playing. I would like a dog on the LOW end of destructive. I would like a pleasant-companion dog who would like to hang out near me but doesn’t need a ton of attention. …I realize it sounds like I am describing a cat, but I feel as if there MUST be dogs like this.

Elizabeth had her scoliosis appointment with the big-city-hospital doctor. It took us over three-and-a-half hours to get there, with traffic and delays. We then waited TWO HOURS in the waiting room past her appointment time. We then waited forty minutes in the exam room. The doctor came in for FIVE MINUTES: he said yes, she needs a Boston brace, but she will only have to wear it twelve hours a day, so she can avoid wearing it to school if she prefers. He sent us over to the department that measures for braces, but they did not have time to see her. So we went home. The entire trip took eleven hours from leaving our house to coming back in the door.

If I were you, I would be suspecting all those numbers of being exaggerations. Like, probably Swistle is just venting frustration and it wasn’t literally a full two hours in the waiting room, and it was probably more like twenty minutes with the doctor. BUT NO. I assure you I am faithfully reporting. Then we had to wait almost ten minutes at the check-out desk, because the one task the doctor was supposed to have done in those five minutes we had with him (write a prescription for the brace) was something he had not done, so the receptionist had to go find him, wait for him to finish with a patient, and get him to write it.

Well. At least we got that one task done in the end.

I also brought Henry in for an appointment with an ENT doctor to see about his relentless sniffing. She said it looked like allergies to her, and now we have an appointment for him to get allergy testing. I’d thought it COULDN’T be allergies, because we’d tried Zyrtec, Claritin, Allegra, Flonase, and nothing helped. She said sometimes allergies manifest more in congestion than in itchiness/sneezing, and that Zyrtec/Claritin/Allegra don’t really help with that; there are decongestant versions of those medications, but she doesn’t generally recommend them (I don’t know if she meant for anyone, or just for kids).

Instead she recommends allergy testing, followed by allergy shots if the testing is as expected. So! Henry is about as pleased as you’d expect. He’s in the Bargaining stage: “If between now and the allergy testing I SUDDENLY stopped sniffing—would I STILL have to get the shots?” He is also nervous about the allergy testing itself. I had that done as a child, and what I remember about it is that the part where they put small amounts of substances under your skin was not so terrible, but the itching afterward was pretty maddening. Still, it’s temporary and endurable—and if the problem is NOT allergies, we’ve ruled out a whole big possibility.

I can tell the doctor is almost certain it IS allergies, though, and that furthermore she’s narrowed down what she thinks is the primary source. She said, “Do you have pets?” and I said we had three cats. She said, “…Do you like them?” It reminded me of one of my favorite family stories about my mom. My brother and I were both diagnosed as children with cat allergies, and my brother also with asthma. The allergy/asthma doctor said to my mother, “You will need to rehome the cats.” She did not argue with him, and she nodded, wide-eyed and compliant. Nevertheless catching something subtle in her manner, he repeated even more firmly, one finger held out warningly: “The cats MUST go.” Again she nodded. He said some third emphatic thing about the cats; she nodded again; he sighed. We did not get rid of the cats.

It seems odd to me that we’ve had cats for Henry’s entire life but he’s only started having trouble the last year or so. Apparently that can happen—but, for example, Elizabeth had allergy testing awhile back, and it showed she was quite allergic to cats, but she doesn’t have any trouble with them. The allergist said that by being around cats since birth, she got the equivalent of allergy shots: her immune system got trained to deal with them. But I guess that is not the way it happened with Henry, if indeed he turns out to be allergic to cats.

Well. The immune system is a neverending mystery.