On Sunday morning, Ian and I had planned to do some farm planning with Regi, who is starting the Hillside Farmers Cooperative. We have joined that cooperative, and we were supposed to meet at his home at 8 AM. It felt wrong to me to show up at breakfast time without bringing food, so I was up at 6:30 AM mixing up some muffins, except it was one of those rare mornings when I was having one contraction after another. Usually the contractions don't gather much steam until later in the day, but I found myself uneasily waddling around the kitchen until Ian came down and firmly convinced me to use my common sense and lie down.
At this point, I took up my post on the couch and started bossing the children around. I was guiding them through the last steps of filling the muffin cups with batter when the dog woke up and greeted me. I thought to myself that he needed to go out, but I did not want to brave the contractions I would get by standing up again, and I wanted to keep the kids focused on their muffin making. It seems that the urgency of the situation had passed because dog companionably lay down near me on a blanket beside the couch.
We were just gearing up for how the children should put the muffins inside the hot oven, which can be a daunting step for them, when I smelled something funny. I looked around, and saw a river of liquid extending from the apparently sleeping dog, across the whole room and under the bottom of the easy chair. I told the children to abandon the muffins. Ian was outside doing something with the chickens, and I asked my daughter to go get him and put the dog outside while my son was supposed to grab our box of rags and throw every single rag on top of the mess to soak it up.
My son took a very measured and thoughtful approach to this job, carefully assessing the shape of each rag and placing it on the floor, apparently with an eye towards aesthetics as well as efficiency. “Just throw them down!” I told him. “Keep the pee from running underneath the wall!” But a moderate approach to rag placement was beyond him.
During the interminable time that Ian spent finishing the chicken chores, I got the children to overturn the easy chair and throw out the soggy clutter that accumulated under it. As she sometimes does when she is disgusted, my daughter started to retch audibly and genuinely as she carried a dripping piece of paper to the trash, but thankfully nothing came up, and she returned to work. I had just talked to children through removing the lampshade from the lamp so we could turn it over on its side and wash its base when my patience finally reached its limits and I stood up to help.
At this point Ian came in, told me to lie back down, and presided over the rest of a cleanup efforts. By the time he was done, and only our easy chair remained on its side, drying, it was already 8 AM. Ian took the muffins and went off to do the farm planning without me, my daughter brought her muffins upstairs to eat in peace and regain her composure, and my son sat down at the computer to watch SpongeBob SquarePants in Spanish. I stayed on the couch, feeling stunned.
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