I'll be doggone

OK.  I realize that the average dog might be subject to the 'move ovah for the strollah' mentality of the average new Boston parent.

But, in this case, at least the dog is not average.  

Sababa, at my feet as I write this, is the sweetest mutt on the planet.  She will leave a steak on the floor if I tell her not to touch it.  She has let me clean her (unfortunate recent) surgical wound with complete trust and without complaint.  She is manipulatively cute and does not exploit it (much).  She is not, my friend, one of the things I will give up when our son is born.

It's just everything else, right?

Knowing nothing about this upcoming life other than that it will take all of our effort all of the time, I am curious about just what this means, this loss of privacy and primacy. Sabie did teach me early on that I am not angered when a helpless being needs me in the middle of the night to clean up its...product...all over the kitchen floor. While I hope I do not need to apply other lessons I learned from her case of tapeworms to my son, I definitely learned something small (and surprising) about myself then. 

But it's a really weird thing not to know how I will respond to the rest of it.  I've always held that parents need to be above the fray, above the level of kids, but I know that I'm easily frustrated when people around me aren't logical (where logical is defined as my opinion wrapped in a thin veneer of clever rhetoric).  I'm also pretty selfish about my free time:  I guess if there's nothing to be selfish about there's nothing to fear, but who knows just how I'll react to the demands. 

And, when I talk to something, I want it to talk back, not just gurgle.  

So I guess we'll see, maybe in all your free time you can tell me how you think about the Essential Commitments and how to respond to them.

At least I know one thing, that I'll have Sabie at my side to help clean the floor of any of Junior's extra Cheerios.  If I tell her to.