Life is fraught with tragedy

So Lea was crying the other day and I was trying to figure out why. To make that task a little more challenging, I tried to figure this out without actually getting up and going over to her. J was tending to her just fine, and this was a particularly interesting bunch of commercials I was watching.

Lea wasn’t in pain, I understood that right away. That kind of cry comes from a deeper place; it’s the truest, most soulful cry in her repertoire. Also, the Pain cry communicates directly with my nervous system, bypassing the brain — when I hear it, I’m up and moving before I even know what I’m doing. The very fact that I was still sitting here watching television told me this wasn’t the Pain cry.

It also wasn’t the cry that means “Parent, you are asking me to do something and I don’t want to.” Lea sucks at that cry — she’ll never be a child actress. She can generate the tears and all, but the cry itself sounds like a comic-book writer’s interpretation of a cry. “Waaaaaah.” This one sounded a little more genuine.

It might be an “Alex is bothering me” cry, but that didn’t sound quite right either. This sounded like a new category, created before my very ears. I wondered what it meant.

A minute or so later, Lea came into the living room and said sadly, “I dropped my lollipop in the potty.”

Ah. Thus is the new cry classified and placed on the spectrum.

At least Lea has a potty to drop candy into. My poor dog is having himself a rough winter. This past weekend’s storm has turned my backyard into a solid sheet of ice. The top layer keeps melting and refreezing, and now Sarah Hughes could comfortably practice back there. Toby cannot walk on this. And yet, he must. It’s either that, or explode.

I really have to videotape this and put it on YouTube.

I’ve noted before that my backyard is at two different altitudes, connected by a steep slope. If Toby wants to get to his usual spot, he has to somehow get up this slope. Every step allows him maybe three inches of progress, but sends one or more legs flying in some random direction. He looks like he’s on the doggie version of that Japanese game show they have on Spike, the one where contestants have to cross narrow bridges in fat suits while wearing high heels.

Coming back down is worse: Yesterday, he did an imitation of Thumper in the winter scene from Bambi, sliding a full fifteen feet on his belly while his paws scrabbled to get themselves back into an upright locked position. Nobody is looking forward to spring more than my dog.