Beware of Dog, Cranky Mom

Our neighborhood attracts a steady flow of door-to-door salespeople and proselytizers. Before I began working at home and caring for a baby who tends to get upset when the doorbell rings and the dog goes berserk, it was a minor annoyance. It is now officially a major pain in my ass – enough so that it prompted me to post the following warning next to our doorbell.


I drafted that message after a weekend of uninvited visitors, beginning with a man and woman who came to our door at 9pm on Friday night. We were all relaxing in our living room, Lana asleep in John’s arms, when the doorbell rang. Rico immediately jumped off the couch and began barking an alarm so loud and high-pitched that it could melt eardrums, not to mention wake up a sleeping baby. I opened the door expecting to find our neighbors in the midst of some kind of emergency. Instead I was greeted by two strangers hawking free carpet cleaning services with a laminated sliver of paper that made them look not quite as official as Napoleon Dynamite’s Tupperware-selling brother and uncle.

I quickly informed them that their carpet colleague had already been by the week before, and I still wasn’t interested. “Oh, you mean Bill?” the woman asked, like I committed to memory the name of random salesmen who came to my door. “I don’t know if it was Bill, but I do know that I’m not interested,” I told her. “Well, I’m not interested either, but I can’t go home until I sign up one more person,” she responded. I don’t know if it was the sound of the crying baby or the glowing red of my eyes, but at that point the man grabbed the woman’s arm and began backing away. “Have a good evening and congratulations on the baby,” he said as they retreated, and I swear he held out his free arm like he was preparing to fend off an attack from a Grizzly Bear.

Baby's First Play Date

Lana had her first official play date over the weekend when Kim, Michael, and their four-month old daughter Alexandra came to visit. Kim and I were both journalism majors at UGA and we had one class together our senior year. We didn’t get to know each other then, though – Kim was an advertising major and I was in public relations. In the small world of the J-school, that’s like the Bloods and the Crips, except we battled with Photoshop and annoying perkiness instead of guns and intimidation. Kim and I later became friends when we worked together after college, and we kept in touch after Kim and Michael moved to California several years ago. Through email, we shared our pregnancy complaints and the joy of the birth of our daughters just one month apart.

When Kim and Michael moved back to Georgia last month, we jumped at the chance to see them again and get our two girls together. I didn’t expect much in terms of interaction between the girls because they are still so young, but Lana and Alex seemed genuinely interested in each other and even reached out to hold hands at one point.

As cute as that was, it was even cuter to see how our guys have come into their own as dads. John couldn’t wait to hold Alex and was genuinely disappointed when she cried as he held her. “If babies don’t want to be held, they shouldn’t be so cute,” he told me. Later on when Lana grabbed the sleeve of Alex’s hoodie, Michael captured the moment perfectly when he used a baby voice to ask, “Is that velour? Where did you get it?” These are two very cute and very lucky Daddy’s girls.