Azul: The Original Princess

Seven years ago today, we adopted our sweet Azul. So, to honor her, she is the subject of today’s post. After all, she was the original princess in our family. 

September 2, 2004 was a terrible day for me. The day before, I lost my job. We had just bought a new house, but had not yet moved. Geoff was in Atlanta on business and Joshua and I were planning to leave the following day to join him there for the Labor Day weekend. My dog, Doobie, had been suffering with skin cancer for over a year. He was in pain, and I was in pain watching him. When I woke up that Thursday morning, I decided that it would be the day that I would finally put Doobie out of his misery. It was something we had discussed with the vet for several months and since everything already sucked, I figured it would be easier on me if I dealt with these two major losses all at once. I called the vet and made an appointment and then I called Geoff to tell him of my decision. He protested and said that he felt like he needed to be there, but I thought it was best to do it on my own. Although he had become our family dog, in reality Doobie was my boy. I adopted him when I was a senior in high school. He went to college with me, traveled across the country with me, went to law school with me, endured countless boyfriends with me (he hated all of them). He escorted me into adulthood, from being a high school kid to being a young professional. He lived in five states and had been to a total of about 20. He went everywhere with me. It didn’t feel right to have anyone else there when he took his final breath. I felt like it would almost be like a slap in the face to have Geoff there. He only needed (and only wanted) me. That morning I took him on a long walk, fixed him a good meal and gave him lots of treats and hugs. Then I took him to do what I hated to do but knew I had to. 

We returned from Atlanta the following week. Our apartment was different without him. There was definitely a huge void. But we would soon be moving to our new home in Carrollton. I thought the change in scenery would help. For the first several weeks after he died, we did a lot of painting and other home improvements before we actually moved. We were busy, which was a good way to keep all of our minds off of Doobie. We talked about getting another dog, but we weren’t ready…or so we thought. On Sunday, September 19^th, we were painting Joshua’s room. Geoff was doing some caulking around the house, but ran out of paper towels, so he went to WalMart to buy some more. He called me from WalMart and said, “they have dogs for adoption over here and one looks just like Doobie.” I asked if I needed to drive over. Geoff said no, that we weren’t ready for another dog. Hesitantly, I agreed. Geoff came home, but realized that he had forgotten the one thing he needed to buy: paper towels. He suggested that I go back over there since I was at a stopping place and then I could see that dog. So I did. Carroll County Animal Support was outside of WalMart. I walked over and there she was. Her name was Casey. She did look like Doobie, just more feminine. A little boy walked up, pointed to her and said, “what an ugly dog! Who would ever want that dog?” I asked the woman what the adoption fee was. Money was tight and we couldn’t really afford a $150 fee, which is what no kill shelters usually charge. “$35.00,” replied the woman. “I’ll take her,” I said. I filled out the application, wrote a check, went inside to buy the paper towels (as well as some new doggy supplies), came back out to claim her, and drove her home.

You have never seen a more excited 5 year old. Joshua was over the moon! I decided to name her Azul (Spanish for Blue – her color), and she knew her name before the day was over because Joshua said it so many times. He could not get enough of her! She filled the void that Doobie's death had created. Plus, I finally had another girl in the house! I had been far outnumbered before. She was my baby girl. As the new center of our universe, she was our family's princess. And she knew it. Like Doobie, she went everywhere with us. She slept in our bed. We lived “out in the county,” so she was able to roam our small subdivision and the surrounding woods (what we called her kingdom). And when she was inside, she would look out a window or the storm door to observe everything going on in her kingdom. 

Azul enjoyed her “princess” status for several years. In March 2007, we adopted Brandeis. She did not like him at all and really didn’t like sharing the spotlight. It took over 4 years, but she finally loves him and will now play with him. Then we left her rural Kentucky kingdom for suburban Chicago. No more roaming. Then Kathleen came along...and then Leighton. That was the big blow. People always told us that when you have kids, your dogs become second-class citizens. I thought that would never be the case at our house, but I was wrong. Don’t get me wrong, we love our dogs, but they don’t get nearly the amount of attention that they used to enjoy. Azul is not crazy about the girls. I don’t know if that’s because they have stolen the spotlight or because they annoy her. She walks away when they try to pet her. Brandeis, on the other hand, lets them pull his tail and tug on his ears. I noticed that we don’t call Azul “Princess” quite as often now that we have two others. But we still love her dearly, and all three kids adore her (and she does still out-rank Brandeis – yes, it’s ok to love one dog more than the other). And I know that as Kathleen and Leighton get older and become better playmates, Azul will grow to love them the way that Brandeis does.

HAPPY 7TH ANNIVERSARY, AZUL!!!!

WE LOVE YOU!!!!

Baseball Princesses

OK, leave it to me to start a blog, post in the blog once, and then abandon it for months. But I am back, and I promise to do a better job of journaling our princess activities. This Spring and Summer have been very busy. Baseball. It was all about baseball. We traveled nearly every weekend. However, the girls and I have managed to do some girl stuff. The weekend of Joshua’s first baseball tournament this season was an incredibly cold one. The highs were in the lower 40’s. Too cold for us girls. We did brave the very first game, which was on a Friday night. It wasn’t too terribly chilly, but then the sky opened up and it rained and rained and rained. They called the game while Kathleen, Leighton and I sat huddled in the car. I managed to get them in there before they got wet, but I was drenched! The following evening, it was way too cold and damp to take them out, so we had a girls’ night out instead. We went to Johnny Brusco’s for pizza and then to Pinnacle to see Gnomeo and Juliet. This was Leighton’s very first movie. It’s never too early to expose kids to Shakespeare. Luckily, this version of the tragedy ended happily and not like the original, although there was a reference to the “right” ending.

Since then, we have enjoyed several girls’ nights, but we don’t usually go out. On the nights that Joshua had basketball or baseball practice, I would do something special like make milkshakes and then we would watch Cinderella or Snow White. These were originally Joshua’s movies and they came with him when his mother sent him to live with us, so they were likely his older sister’s originally. They are on VHS, so I had to dig out the VCR and hook it up to the TV. Before we bought a new television and were watching these movies on Geoff’s old big screen, the picture and sound were horrible. It was almost painful to watch. We bought a new HD flat screen sometime in the Spring and it has made all the difference! Kathleen now loves Cinderella!!! She has a blue leotard that she wears to gymnastics. It has a little tutu on it. It must remind her of Cinderella, or maybe I told her she looks like a princess in it, because she actually calls it her “princess.”

There were also a few times when Geoff was traveling on business and I had to take Joshua to basketball practice. The facility where his practices were held is absolutely filthy, so there was no way I was sitting in there for an hour with a two-year old. That’s like asking for a staph infection. It is GROSS! Instead, I would drop Joshua off and the three of us girls would go to Chick-Fil-A. Kathleen and I would share a milkshake and she would play in the play area.

As the weather grew warmer and baseball season was in full-swing, our girls’ nights have been fewer. It’s been baseball, baseball, baseball!!! But Kathleen loves it. She wants to wear her Storm t-shirt (what she calls her “baseball shirt”) ALL the time. Then, the other day, Kathleen was loving on Leighton. She was saying, “Hey, beebee. Hey beebee.” Then, she said, “Hey, baseball princess.” Ahh, out of the mouths of babes! Where does she get this stuff? Spring baseball ended just after the 4^th of July with a week-long World Series tournament played in Dallas, Texas. We had a few weeks of down time, and Joshua had his first baseball practice for the Fall season last night. We left Team Storm, and he’ll be playing on the Bobcats this Fall and next Spring. Time to buy new “baseball shirts” for the “baseball princesses!”

Think Pink

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a mom…and not just a mom, but a mom to little girls. Actually, I wanted twin girls. My best friends back then, Brandey and Mande, were twins. Except back then they were known as Brandy and Mandy. When they hit adolescence, they started experimenting with various spellings of their names and finally settled on Brandey and Mande. But I digress. These girls are not identical, but shared a womb just the same. My own sister and I have nearly 5 years between us, so we were never really friends as children, although we are great friends now as adults.  Anyway, I loved being friends with Brandey and Mande. We had a lot of fun in those days, usually doing things we should not have been doing, but also doing things that little girls love to do. We rode our bikes, went to the pool everyday and played school all the time. But I always wished I was a twin too, to have that bond with a sister and best friend who was there all the time and didn’t go back to her own house at the end of every day. I have always known that my chance of having twins was slim to none, but a girl can dream, right? More important to me, however, was to have a girl before I had a boy. I am a fourth generation first-born female. I am the oldest of my siblings, my mom is the oldest, my grandmamma was the oldest, and my nanny was the oldest. We think that Nanny’s mother was also a first-born female, but we aren’t sure. They say that first-born females are very independent and have dominant personalities. That is definitely the case for me. I’ve also heard that if your second toe is longer than your first toe, you have a dominant personality. Not only is my second toe longer than my big toe, but so is my third toe. Of course, that may be because I walk on my toes, so my toes are very long since they provide for my balance. Anyway, that doesn’t really have anything to do with the purpose of this blog, but just an interesting observation. My point is that I have always wanted to carry on the first-born female thing just because I think it’s kind of cool. However, to complicate things, I also wanted to have a boy first so my girls would have an older brother to protect them and scare boys away. I always wanted an older brother for that reason, but I was blessed with a little brother. Since I couldn’t have both a first-born daughter and a first-born son, I preferred to have a girl first. It never really occurred to me back in my younger days that I might actually get both.

Fast forward about 20 years. I met my husband, Geoff, in September of 2002 while I was in my third year of law school. We were both at Slugger Field in Louisville at a bluegrass festival. He was sitting a few rows ahead of me with some friends and he was wearing a t-shirt from Smith’s Olde Bar, a well-known music venue in Atlanta, my hometown. Since I have this dominant personality being a fourth generation first-born female and all, I walked up to him and asked if he was from Atlanta. He said yes…Marietta to be exact, Lassiter High School. I am also from Marietta and would have gone to Lassiter had Pope High School not been built. We both went to Mabry Middle School. We exchanged phone numbers and went on our first date about six weeks later when we went to the University of Georgia/University of Kentucky football game in Lexington. Now, you don’t really need to know any of that, but I love that story and had an excuse to tell it. At Thanksgiving of that year, Geoff and I went to Atlanta together to visit our families for the holiday. That was when I met his son, Joshua for the first time. Eight months later, Geoff and I were moving in together. Joshua’s mom, Nora, had decided to send Joshua to Louisville to live with his dad. We wanted to give Joshua the most stable environment possible and we didn’t feel like having two separate residences was the best way to do that. My lease was up, so Geoff upgraded from a one-bedroom to a three-bedroom at his complex and we all became a family on August 2, 2003, two days after I took the bar exam. I suddenly found myself the mother (or not quite stepmother – we weren’t married yet) to a four year old boy. It all became official about two years later when Geoff and I (and Joshua) tied the knot on June 11, 2005. Since 2003, the three of us lived as a family. Joshua calls me Maggie, but when talking to other people (including his mother), he refers to me as his mom. When he was in kindergarten, one of his classmates asked him, “who’s Maggie?” He said, “my mom.” She asked, “well, why do you call her Maggie?” and he replied, “that’s her name!” I don’t really think that cleared it up for her, but her mom probably explained the situation to her when she got home.

Since Joshua came into my life, it has become very sports-centered. Don’t get me wrong…I love sports. I love watching sports and I love playing sports. BUT, all of our family activities seem to be sports-related. Before my daughters were born, my evenings, of course, were filled with soccer practice and football practice and baseball practice and basketball practice. And my weekends were spent at Joshua’s games. I bought a video camera just hours before his first soccer game (the very first sport he ever played) so we could capture this very important milestone. I videotaped nearly every single one of his games up until the time Kathleen was born. I still tape, but it is harder to do while trying to keep up with a busy toddler. I love being a soccer mom, a football mom, a baseball mom, a basketball mom. It is so much fun to watch Joshua play. He is a talented athlete and if he puts his mind to it, I believe that he could play sports at a college level. We have invested a lot of time and money into athletics. Travel teams, camps, clinics…thousands of dollars and hours. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now, since I was the only girl in the house, our family outings have always been more mannish than girly. We go to Braves games and Georgia football games, hockey games, University of Arkansas baseball games, minor league baseball games, high school football and basketball  games, etc. Our DVR is full of different games and NASCAR races. We own so many sports movies: Rudy, Remember the Titans, Facing the Giants, Friday Night Lights, Dale, 3, We are Marshall, The Express, Miracle, Invincible, Hoosiers. We have been to the Negro League Baseball Museum, the International Motor Sports Hall of Fame at Talladega, etc. I have fun doing these things, but I miss going to the theatre, the ballet. We did go see the Nutcracker, but that’s because Joshua’s school went on a field trip and Geoff and I chaperoned. I also made them go see A Midsummer Night’s Dream with me, but they were both so bored. Joshua actually said he liked some of it, but when I asked what he liked about it, he said, “the sword fighting.”

Oh, how I longed for a daughter to share these girly things with. So, when Geoff and I started talking about having our own kids, I began preparing for a girl immediately. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try osmosis. I found myself buying pink. Pink shirts, pink hats. I bought a pink cell phone. I lost my Nalgene bottle and replaced it with a pink one. I have been drinking from this pink water bottle daily for three years now. When we were conceiving Kathleen through in vitro, I wore a pink shirt to my embryo transfer appointment, and probably to a good number of all of my doctor’s appointments. I wore pink to my 20 week ultrasound. All of that hard work paid off. I found out I was having a girl. A lot of women don’t care for pink and try to avoid dressing their daughters in pink. Yet, thinking pink worked for me, so I embrace that color and have had no qualms about dressing Kathleen in it. When Kathleen was 15 months old, I found out I was pregnant again. It was a big surprise since we didn’t think we could conceive “the old fashioned way.” This time around, I honestly had no preference of sex. We both wanted another boy for certain reasons. First, Joshua is the last male Goodsole, so if he doesn’t have sons, my husband’s name will die off. In the United States, we know of no other Goodsoles except for my husband’s family. There is also my ego that wants one of my biological children to also carry on the family name. Another reason is sports. As I said before, Joshua is an exceptional athlete, but his mother is about as athletic as an old sock. Geoff and I can only wonder what a combination of our genes could produce athletically.. We have also saved all of Joshua’s clothes “for the next kid,” as we always said. So, we have no shortage of wardrobe for a little guy. But there were also reasons to want another girl. Our first concern was space. We moved into our current house when Kathleen was seven weeks old. We have four bedrooms and couldn’t really afford to buy anything larger. Because we live so far away from our family, we need a guest room. Plus, Geoff inherited some antique bedroom furniture from his grandmother, so we need place to put that. Remembering my own love for drawing on anything and everything as a child, we decided it wasn’t a good idea for this furniture to serve as furniture for one of our kids. When we found out we were expecting again, we decided that if it was another girl, she and Kathleen would share a room and if it was a boy, we would have to put an addition on the house. The latter is not exactly a safe move in today’s economy, especially with the risk that Geoff could easily be transferred again. After all, we had moved three times in four and a half years. Then there is the wardrobe factor. A girl would also have no shortage of clothes, and because of the timing of this pregnancy, all of Kathleen’s baby clothes would work again in terms of the baby’s size during each of the seasons. The biggest advantage to having another girl, however, is the fact that they would be good friends. So, when we found out we were having another girl we were both very happy with that.

Kathleen and Leighton aren’t twins. They don’t even qualify as Irish twins. But they are so close in age they can always play together and will go to school together. So many other moms with girls this close in age have asked me if they share a room and have shared stories of their own girls being best friends. One mom told me that when they moved into a larger house which allowed her girls to each have their own rooms, they wanted nothing of it. They wanted to continue to share a room. Kathleen loves her baby sister and you can see the love for Kathleen in Leighton’s eyes and her smile. I know these girls will be the best of friends. So, I realize how very blessed I am. I got my fifth generation first-born female. But I also have the big brother to watch out for his sisters. And even though my girls aren’t twins, they are close enough. I have already started buying matching outfits for them, a task which will become easier once Leighton is a little older. It is hard to find infant clothes that have matching toddler clothes. As all of my children grow older, we will see a gradual shift from all things boy to all things girl. I have no doubt that my girls will play sports. Kathleen has already started gymnastics and she has one heck of an arm. I definitely see softball and soccer in her future…and possibly football (she loves it). But I cannot wait for ballet lessons and dance recitals. It is only six short years before Joshua leaves for college and our boy-life phases out. I hope he plays college sports so I can continue to watch him play and his sisters can appreciate his talent, but I look forward to the princess years with Kathleen and Leighton.