Here is some video of a typical day in our house. The first part is Kramer running from Dad (with Sushi chasing his tail from the back of the sofa). Cosmo used to play along, until the day he ran his knee into the fireplace… so now he immediately puts his tail between his legs and tries to “make up” with Dad as soon as the play gets started. The second clip is Sushi picking a play-fight with Cosmo, for which our little lion hunter is a much more willing participant.

So the next thought was obviously to name my four dwarfs. Let’s see… Kramer is an easy one – he’d have to be “Furry” since he’s a husky. For Sushi, the name “Fraidy” would be appropriate (as in Fraid E. Cat) because he’s so shy.

Cosmo is a bit harder because so many good nicknames apply. There’s “Weenie” because he’s such a chicken. He can frequently be found running with his tail between his legs, and he refuses to set his paws on the least bit damp or cool grass. Some lion-hunter he is. Then there’s “Dopey” because of how he runs head-first into things and has a completely one-track mind. But I think the most fitting name for him would be “Noisy.” He is always so loud. His stretches are loud. His eating is loud. His toots and burps are loud. His yawns are loud. His mutters are loud. His walking and running is loud. Even his breathing is loud.

For Levi, although “Cutie” is tempting, I think that’s too generic. So he would have to be named “Smiley.” He is such a happy baby. When we’re feeding him, sometimes we have to give him smile breaks because he just can’t wipe it off his face long enough to eat. You can even get him to smile while he’s crying, which makes for quite an interesting sight.

So there it is. Snow White and her Four Dwarfs, Furry, Fraidy, Noisy and Smiley. If only we still had Hugo. Then we could have a fifth dwarf named “Scratchy.”

Once they hear their cue, Cosmo immediately races to his bowl in a single bound and starts inhaling his food without stopping to chew. Meanwhile, Kramer remains seated for a few moments and prepares himself mentally for his next meal. Perhaps he’s saying a silent prayer, wondering quietly to himself what is on the menu, or reflecting on previous meals that were particularly tasty. But being quite the genteel soul that he is, it just takes him a bit longer to warm up to meal time. He even self-regulates his appetite, occasionally skipping a meal to maintain his lean frame.

Upon the eventual commencement of his meal, he gracefully walks to his bowl (Cosmo is usually about halfway done by this point), takes a few bites of food in his mouth, walks a few feet away from his bowl, and drops them on the ground so he can eat one piece at a time without feeling rushed. Then he gingerly returns to his bowl and continues eating, still savoring each kernel individually.

Cosmo is more of a foodie. In fact, you could say he’s obsessed. Like a shark, he explores the world orally, chewing on anything new in his path (cardboard, aluminum foil, you name it…). He’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get whatever food he sees. Apparently, he’s convinced that his supply is scarce. He eats twice as much food as Kramer, yet always finishes first. Then in an effort to inch as close as physically possible to Kramer’s food without actually touching it (which is against the rules), he will start drinking water out of the very edge of Kramer’s water bowl while staring intently at Kramer’s food. We call it “coveting.”

For your viewing enjoyment, here is some footage of just that.

• Kramer (our husky): He’ll gingerly trot over to each side of our bed, put his muzzle on the mattress, give a gentle sigh in hopes that we’ll pet him one last time, and then go to bed for the night. He gets his Kong chew toy (his “woobie”) and curls up into a tiny ball under a concentrated stream of cool air from the vent.
• Cosmo (our ridgeback): He’s usually already in his crate by around 4 PM. When he’s being slightly less lazy than usual, he’ll sit up in his crate when we start getting ready for bed, and make really loud yawns, stretches and sighs. Since Cosmo loves his crate so much, he’s basically worn his dog bed to a pulp. So sometimes he’ll whimper for us to let him in Kramer’s crate so he can sleep on the cushier mattress.

• Sushi (our cat): Being the rather timid fellow that he is, he’s actually afraid of the baby. At night he’s usually asleep belly-up in the guest or media room, but will come into our room at bedtime and stare at us from atop the dressers until we go to sleep. Then he’ll go sleep on the back of the sofa until morning. That way, if something scares him during the night, he’ll have plenty of places to hide underneath the den furniture. And if we wake up throughout the night to feed the baby, he can quickly steal some loving time by wrapping around our legs as we warm up some milk in the kitchen.
• Levi: after his last feeding or bath depending on the night, we change him, put on his wires for his apnea monitor, and put him in a little shoebox-like contraption called a co-sleeper in between our pillows. He’s pretty small anyway, but he looks especially tiny in a big-person bed! We’ve noticed too that babies are very bow-legged. We sometimes put him on his side, and his little legs just dangle in the air like he’s propped up on an invisible saddle. His feet come nowhere near touching each other. And apparently baby dreams are all about milk, because he’ll quickly start suckling in his sleep, amidst the tiniest little breathing sounds and sighs. It is SO cute!

Here are the photos of the little guy heading off to his happy new home.

So the vet started the surgery (over 2.5 hours after we got to the hospital) and after 3.5 hours under the knife, they decided they needed to wake Kramer up. The only problem was that they didn’t get all of the pins out of him. They got 137 of the 140 pins he ate. That’s right – they decided to leave 3 in him. Not surprisingly, they wanted to do another surgery the next day (that wasn’t included in their “worst-case” estimate) to get those last 3 pins out of him. But we decided against that, and took Kramer to our regular vet as soon as he was stable and let him perform the surgery. It’s a good thing we did that – our vet discovered that one of the incisions in Kramer’s stomach was not properly closed and was leaking fluid into his body. Not a good thing. But after almost 2 more hours of surgery, our vet was able to get the last 3 pins out of Kramer and patched up the mess that was left from the previous surgery.

Today, Kramer is almost completely back to normal. The only evidence of the fiasco is his shaved belly and the scar from the incision. He’s enjoying playing and fighting once again with his brother Cosmo and muttering to everyone is his deep voice. All is well once again in the Birchfield Barnyard.

You might not recognize it, but it is the remnant of a gum drop tree, minus precisely 140 gumdrops and stainless steel 1” straight pins as we would later learn. I had made it for a Christmas decoration. Though we had it tucked away on a ledge, we hadn’t yet packed it and the other melt-able decor away because we’re currently shuffling around our closets to make room for baby. Here is the innocent-looking gum drop tree in all its glory, prior to consumption:

We suspect that Sushi the cat, who enjoys pushing various objects off ledges for fun of watching the gravitational pull, pushed the gum drop tree onto the floor to within reach of the doggies. We weren’t sure whether one or both of them had consumed all or part of the gum drops and/or straight pins, but we did know a few things: 1) the boys were acting giddy as though on a sugar high; 2) Kramer was springing around the house like he had gotten away with something; and 3) there was no trace of any gum drops or pins. Obviously at that point, the culprit(s) were still feeling just fine.

We immediately called our vet to make sure they’d stay open for us, and then rushed both doggies in for x-rays. Cosmo was first in line. His x-ray came back clear. Then, we saw Kramer’s. As you can see below, it clearly shows a conglomeration of dozens of straight pins suspended in a goo of partially digested gumdrops. Since it was now nearly 6 PM on a Friday night, upon our vet’s referral, we rushed the dogs to the emergency clinic for surgery without even slowing down to pay the x-ray bill on our way out the door. Our vet called the emergency clinic twice on our way to let them know a medical emergency would be coming within minutes.

Once we got to the emergency clinic, we handed over the x-rays, signed in, and… waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. We sat there for over an hour while other animals, with less severe prognoses I might add, came and went.

Meanwhile, Kramer was obviously deteriorating, from pooping right there on the floor (very unlike him), to puking up blood. When I asked Wendi at the front desk if we could therefore expedite our consultation with the vet, she replied, “Sorry, but all the vets are tied up on the phone right now. Have a seat – we’ll be with you shortly.” I felt like Ben Stiller in the airplane boarding scene of Meet the Parents.

So at 7, the vet, who must’ve been in a back room counting dollar signs, finally emerged for our long-awaited consultation. She took about 2 seconds to tell us that she recommended surgery (duh), and then spent the next 10 minutes detailing the money situation. She just wanted to prepare us for the worst, so she said. She showed us a detailed printout estimate, and let me tell you, it was a whopper of bill. But she assured us it was the “worst case scenario.” We gave her the green light, and told her that our main concern at that point was the already considerable delay. In response, she said she would have them immediately start Kramer’s IVs for surgery, and we’d get a call when the surgery was over.

TO BE CONTINUED…