My Inaugural Post

Okay, so about the hideous picture.

Yep, it's really me in all my frump-mama glory.

The picture itself was staged the morning after the following events took place:

A couple of years back, I was up early getting ready to go help in my son's class at school. Although I am usually a jeans and tee-shirt kind of mom (hence, FrumpMama), I can and do rise to the occasion when necessary (church, husbands workplace & son's school), taking extra pains to look my fab best...pains being the operative word here.

You know how it is, ladies. Beauty takes time.

Lots of time.

Because there are lots of steps.

Get up, plug in hot-rollers, shower, shave, lather-rinse-repeat, dry off, dress to the shoes, apply anti-perspirant, brush & floss, gargle, apply masque to face before drying hair to hurry the drying process along, then while masque is drying, put in hot rollers...and so on.

So I had just rolled my hair when I heard very loud firm knocking on the front door.

Our puppy Raisin was immediately on the job, sounding the alarm at the front entryway and trying for all she was worth, trying to sound older and more fearsome than her age.

"Who could that be?" I muttered as I headed down the hallway, not expecting anyone at that relatively early hour of the morning (it was around 8:00 am and my son wasn't even up for school yet for crying out loud).

The loud insistent raps were heard again and the knocking pattern was unfamiliar so I picked up the pace a bit.

Raisin was circling madly and barking like crazy when I shuffled past to get to the peephole. "Yeah, yeah, Raizy...it's okay," I said soothingly in an effort to quiet her down, then stood on tiptoe to peek outside.

To my surprise, there on my porch stood two uniformed officers.

My heart leapt to my throat, and before I could fully comprehend what that might mean, my husband having left for work an hour or so before, I heard officer # 1 loudly say, "Animal Control!"

In that initial deer-in-the-headlights moment of panic (which was what the photo was supposed to capture, by the way), I called out rather feebly, "Ah--j-just a moment, officer."

Even FrumpMama's have some dignity, after all.

I hightailed it back to my bathroom, and in the next 20 seconds, I madly wet and wrung out a washcloth and furiously scrubbed the dried, crackly masque from my face with my right hand, while jerking hot rollers from my hair with my left hand, ala Edward Scissorhands (except for me, it was those little horseshoe clip thingies that hold the hot rollers to a person's head flying all over the place)...all the while wondering why they would be on my porch.

When I finished in what I deemed to be record time, I took one last glance in the mirror to be sure I hadn't missed a hot roller, and rushed back to answer the door, feeling a bit sheepish about the delay.

The good news? The neighbors with the incessantly barking dogs which I had recently called the city about had been cited and fined, and the dogs were remarkably quiet from that point on.

The bad news? Animal Control opted to go door-to-door through our entire neighborhood on a 'routine' check for dog licenses in order to accomplish this.

And our little pup Raisin, who had been with us nearly 6 months, hadn't yet gotten hers (bad dog owners, BAD!).

Interesting 'routine' check, that. In the 6 almost 7 years we'd been in that house, they'd never once been by for anything!

In hindsight, I suppose the Lord wanted to drive home to me that scripture about not pointing out the bark (or was that speck?) in someone else's eye when you have a dog--er, make that a log in your own. And probably also to go to the person first (Matthew 18 principle), rather than immediately going all the way to the top.

We were issued a warning and had 15 days to get the license (cha-ching).

Even worse was that this necessitated setting in motion the process of getting Raisin fixed, because the city gave a coupon at the time of licensing for a good percentage off of the procedure if it was done within a certain (short) time frame with verification.

So at the vet's office the following day for the spay consultation/doggie physical (cha-ching, cha-ching!), we learned that our bargain (free) purebred Shar-Pei puppy had a very serious problem common to wrinkle-faced dog breeds called entropion.

Which had already caused her wrinkles to push her lashes inward and worst-case-scenario could cause scratching of the cornea and eventually blindness (cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!!).

The vet explained the logic behind taking care of both the spay and the eye lift at the same time.

I might add that I'm thankful I was the one that took her to the vet that day, because had it been the man of the house, I'm not sure the puppy would have come home with him that day.

Not to imply that my husband is heartless...he loves that dog and probably spends more time with her than I do...but as the sole breadwinner in this home, he was faced with one of those weight-of-the-world decisions: hmmm...feed the family this week and keep car #2 limping along or prevent the beloved family dog from going blind in the future? Needless to say, the dog was the least of his worries right then.

Due to the time contstraints and all, and wanting the best for all my family including the dog, I was willing to live on rice and lentils if need be to be sure our dear pup didn't go blind.

Not long after that, she underwent a hysterectomy-of-sorts and an eye-lift.

Both at the same time.

Poor Raisin. She was out of commish for a week with stitches hither and yon, and had to add to her humiliation, had to wear one of those lampshade collars.

I'm pretty sure someone must have been through a similar ordeal to have coined that phrase "Sicker than a dog".

She was pitiful.

Needless to say, my husband was not a happy camper shelling out all that money for dog-related expenses.

I won't even go into how Raisin's wound care and the nasty job of keeping her lampshade collar clean fell to me because no way, no how was he going to do it after spending all that money because I'm just self-sacrificing that way.

Which was precisely why I felt compelled to stage the picture the following day for his desktop background.

The good news is that it did garner the chuckles I had hoped for when he signed on that evening and that picture popped up at him life size.

The bad news? The family dog is the only one that will ever get cosmetic surgery around here.