At approximately 6:27 a.m. Miss A woke up, called out “Mommmmmmmmmmy” and headed straight for the couch. Being the good mother I am, I brought her a pillow from her bed and covered her with a small quilt so I could possibly bribe her with letting me sleep 30 more minutes. I tucked the quilt around her and gave her a big kiss.

She looked up at me, smiled, and said, “I love kisses. Kisses are beautiful!”

It’s impossible to stay mad over losing some Saturday morning sleep when I hear something like that.

And now for something funny. I took this in the car on the way to the pet store with Bailey.

What do you think Miss A is thinking?

Today is a very special family member’s birthday. Honestly we don’t know when her actual birthday is, but we do know that she was born in 1997, which was the same year the hubby and I got married. We were young, in love, and had romantic notions of owning a dog, taking it for long walks, and feeding it doggy bon bons while it napped lovingly at our feet.

Enter Bailey.

October 2000, Bailey and I hiking with the hubby at Edwin Warner Park in Nashville.

We had been talking about getting a dog and then one fall day he called me at work to tell me he was at the local Humane Association and that he’d found the cutest Corgi mix with remarkably huge ears who was an abuse case. She was a Corgi/German Shepherd mix they called Punkin. The workers at the shelter liked to bring her into the breakroom. They told us she loved potato chips. She rode home with the hubby in his red Suzuki Sidekick, and when I got home from work that evening they were asleep together on the couch.

At some point in her doggy youth, before she was removed from her first home, Bailey’s left leg was broken and it never healed properly. That’s never slowed her down. Although she is now more than 70 years old in human years, she is still in amazing shape, although this year she has difficulty making our neighborhood mile walk with us.

I don’t know what horrors she went through the first few months of her life, but since joining our family she’s lived a fairly posh life. When we first brought her home she was absolutely terrified of a collar and leash. Housebreaking her was a complete and total nightmare and since then I’ve sworn we’ll never have a puppy again. She ate a hole in the carpet in the stairs at our old condo, where she used to “lay lay sun sun” whenever the sunlight would stream in through our front window. Yes, hubby and I completely doted on her and treated her like a baby-a baby with four paws, huge ears, and a penchant for tennis balls and leftover milk in the cereal bowl.

Now I definitely complain about her. She can be annoying. Her barking at 5:30 a.m. and waking me up today wasn’t a good way to foster touchy feely love and affection for her on her birthday, but then Miss C got up, bounded out of bed and ran downstairs to sing Happy Birthday to the “queen” on her throne (our old couch downstairs.)

Bailey has been a good, good girl to us all these years and at 11 years old, she’s still going strong. She was our baby before we had babies. She helped us break in our first home. She slept with us in our bed until I got pregnant with Miss C in 2001. Our second Christmas card photo as husband and wife features me, hubby, Bailey, and Santa and Mrs. Claus. No, I’m not kidding.

Tonight she’s celebrating like the fabulous girl she is…with sweets and shopping at her favorite store. But she won’t be getting in bed with us.

p.s. I thought I’d lost the next photo, which was a prank ultrasound photo that the hubby e-mailed to our friends and family in 2001 when I was pregnant with Miss C. Yeah, we’re weird.

Yesterday we went for a Sunday afternoon drive in the country to a beautiful farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee, that is owned by one of the hubby’s clients. The lovely Miss Connie, who works for the client and who I have heard about for years, was our hostess. She had made a a big batch of two kinds of cookies, plus the best strawberry jello Cool Whip concoction ever. How is it that I have made it to 39 years of age without ever having that stuff?

Besides the horses and ponies and barn cats, the big draw was the farm’s newest residents: two adorable 9-week-old Corgis. Little girls and puppies go together like Dora and Boots, like Captain and Tenille, like Jack and Coke.

Miss C and Mr. C, AKA Casey The Completely Adorable Puppy

Repeat after me, “We will not get another dog. We will not get another dog. We will not get another dog.”

Puppies, especially, are a lot of work, and not merely cute photo props. Not to mention the fact that we have a psycho old biddy dog who would probably pee in the puppy chow. She is the queen bitch of our house and her glorious reign of supreme psycho bitchiness will not be undermined by some sassy young stud who already knows his way with the ladies.

Did anyone else watch Greatest American Dog last night on CBS? We’ve never watched it, but we caught the tail end of it (heh) and I thought the girls might enjoy it. I couldn’t believe the melodrama of the judges. For the final challenge the dog owners and their pets had to create a painting using various techniques. One judge was so “professional” that she told a dog owner that her painting sucked. A painting…by a dog. Also, couldn’t a professional judge choose a better word than sucked? Apparently the judge thought the heart the dog painted looked like a pretzel. I would have trouble getting my 3-year-old child, much less a Pomeranian, to paint a perfect heart.

Speaking of dogs, this morning Miss C was sitting on her bedroom floor pulling tufts of fur off our Akita mix, Jack (it’s the kind of preening temptation you have when someone’s shoulders are peeling from sunburn). He’s shed enough lately to stuff a small sofa. I asked her to please stop, put the fur tufts in the trash, and wash her hands for breakfast.

“Oh mommy I just put his hair under here,” she says, pointing UNDER HER BED.

Over the holidays (yes I am still talking about the holidays…please, it’s only January, I am still recovering) Miss C went over to my mom’s house for the few days I had to actually go in and work check e-mail and drink coffee in the glorious solitude of my office. My mom brought Miss C home one day after lunch and Miss C promptly started hitting Bailey, our 10-year-old Corgi/German Shepherd mix, as hard as she could right above her tail bone with the palm of her bare hand.

My mom: “Oh honey, don’t hit Bailey!”

Miss C: “She likes it Grandma!”

Me: “Oh it’s okay. Bailey loves to be spanked.”

I took yesterday off since school was not in session and Miss C and I had rare a mommy/daughter outing to the big mall south of here after her morning dentist appointment. We hit Claire’s first and did some serious four dollar damage. Good Lord that place is like retail heroin to a 5-year-old girl and as luck would have it they were slashing prices. Miss C spent her hard earned allowance on a pink Barbie wallet, an adorable pair of sheer white daisy fairy wings that I still can’t believe were just a dollar, Hello Kitty lipgloss in a toy cell phone, and a mini Doodle Bear. I couldn’t come home empty handed for Miss A, so I picked up some Dora slippers sporting some frou frou maribou for a big fat dollar.

After all these exhaustive major purchases that required us to make such life changing decisions as, “Do I want the Barbie wallet, which I could use for cookie and milk money at school, or do I want to invest in the sparkly plastic headband trio?,” we headed upstairs and stopped at the pet shop on our way to browse, yes just browse, in Build A Bear and the Disney Store. Seriously if Miss C had known that all this was on our afternoon agenda, her mind would have exploded just trying to wrap itself around the awesomeness. I have skillfully denied both my children the pleasure of Build A Bear since our neighborhood mall has been slowly dying for years and the best thing going for it was a generic Chuck E. Cheese and a working elevator.

But back to the pet shop. I am easily distracted by retail therapy.

There were all sorts of adorable pedigreed puppies but I bet none of them grows up to have a spanking fetish like Bailey.

Mutts rule!

Today I decided that I deserved a cherry limeade and some tater tots from Le Sonic and made a pit stop before picking up Miss C from school.

I pulled in behind a Lincoln Navigator driven by a mom. Her license plate holder said, “I’m Not Spoiled. My Husband Just Loves Me.”

Translated I believe that means this woman is a, well, you know. I must confess to stereotyping her.

And then I got home and realized the only car adornment on my Nissan Pathfinder is a black and white oval sticker that says WOOF. I’m sure the day I slap a soccer mom sticker on my hatch is not far off, as we are in season three of soccer for Miss C.

But I digress. Back to my beloved WOOF sticker.

Translated I believe that means, “I’m Not Spoiled. But My Dogs Sure As Hell Are.”

Miss Bailey Is Ten, originally uploaded by blondemom.

We have two four-legged children in our house and although they don’t speak, their wagging tails, soulful eyes, and nails excitedly clicking on our hardwood floors speak volumes.

Miss Bailey turns 10 today. Only we don’t know that today is truly her birthday. But it’s been 10 years since we adopted our first girl and rescued her from the Humane Association, which we jokingly call the Bastille. She is, after all, of royal descent, being part Corgi, part German Shepherd.

I will never forget the day we got Bailey. We had been married for a few months and couldn’t stop talking about how we longed for a dog…a furry friend to take to the park and play ball with (and try to house break for months upon frustrating to the point of ripping your hair out months, but of course you don’t think about those things when you have puppy lust and romanticize dog ownership as nothing but tail wagging and ear scratching…for the dog, not the owners.)

The hubby and I both agreed that adopting a dog from our local animal shelter was the route we wanted to take. No pedigreed pooch for us. No sir. We wanted a dog truly in need of a home. The hubby called me one day at work, ten years ago this fall, and said he had found a sweet puppy with huge ears that really needed a home. They called her Punkin. We called her Bailey. They said she liked to eat potato chips in the break room. We took her for a walk around the shelter parking lot. She was skittish and jumpy. Mostly she was starved for affection and love and needed reassurance that no one would harm her ever again. She’d been removed from her home as an abuse case and her front right leg was crooked from a break.

Bailey still has issues, but she has come a long way. When we first brought her home she was terrified to be walked on a leash. She’d plant her paws firmly on to the asphalt and cower with fear. Now she loves to go for walks in our neighborhood, although age is creeping up on her and it was difficult for her to make the usual one mile round in the heat of the summer. She gets scared during thunderstorms and hides under furniture. When I got pregnant in 2001 with Miss C I was determined to break her habit of sneaking under the covers with us. But if I start to feel sorry for her I remember that she has it luckier than most dogs. You see, she has her choice of sleeping on not one, but two, sofas in our home.

Earlier this year I worried myself over an odd growth on Bailey’s side, and convinced myself she had some sort of terminal doggy cancer. The hubby took her to the vet and broke the news to me. It was a fat roll.

Tonight Bailey will have white cake with strawberry icing and pastel sprinkles and if Miss C has her way, we will be going to the store to buy Bailey a Disney Princess collar.

Happy Birthday Old Girl. Thank you for all the love you have given us over the past 10 years.