My pet tongue

I've got more than two children living at home. I also have two dogs. One is a rat terrier mix we picked up at the pound five years ago named Beryl. She was already a year old and had most of her personality when we got her. She is very sweet, but was intensely mistreated before we got her. She wants to please us so bad, but even after five years with us she doesn't let her guard completely down. She develops all kinds of fun little obsessions that we have to work getting her to break. Her most current is sitting at the base of a tree and watching for our yard's resident squirrel. That alone seems like normal dog behavior, but she will sit there for hours doing it.

Since we had one dog, a month later we though she needed a playmate so we picked up another dog. He is a "miniature" dachshund. That miniature is in quotes because he grew quite a bit larger than a miniature is supposed to be. He isn't fat, he has a nice body shape, just much longer than he should be. We bought him from a "breeder" for $35. That isn't a typo, just $35. The people just never bothered to get their dog fixed, so we ended up with a puppy. Little did we know we were actually buying a tongue with a dog attached to it. We have chosen to call the dog portion Turbo and the tongue portion Lickey. We have yet to figure out which portion of the pair controls the whole, but I will say EVERYTHING in our house has a fine layer of dog spit on it. That would be from the Lickey portion. Either way, both portions are extremely attached to me. We are talking separation anxiety attachment. On top of that, Beryl ended up just tolerating Turbo, so he really is not her playmate as we intended, and I now have a dog that sits right next to me constantly and another dog that sits on the floor and stares at me and the other dog. Sometimes I can get her to join us, but mostly she just stares.

I almost understand Beryl's world. We got her and she loved us from the start. She played with us and followed us around, then we got Turbo. She was a little standoffish after that. Less than a month after we got Turbo, I found out I was pregnant with my oldest. Within a period of 3 years I got two dogs and two children. No wonder I feel like I'm going crazy sometimes. Maybe I should be out there with Beryl at the tree.