Missed recitals and nearly scared to death

I learned the hard way that Darby missed a piano recital today. I was pretty upset with her for not having passed on the word, when I'm certain her piano teacher hounded her with many reminders. That said, I'm disappointed that her piano teacher didn't relay such reminders to me when I was at her studio twice in four days last week in preparation for Darby's Piano Guild audition. The real shame of her missing the recital was the fact that she wasn't there to accept her guild diploma.



The girls and I went to dinner with my father. We went by his house afterward, and when we got there, there were two stray (larger than one might expect) puppies on my dad's lawn. I told the girls not to touch the puppies and to just keep walking to grandpa's door. But as expected, the puppies approached, and Shelby got scared (the puppies stood about half her height) and started to move away from them. Shelby had a large-puppy-face-scratching incident when she was four, so she's had a bit of a strange-animal phobia since then. Of course the puppies thought she was playing with them, so they immediately gave chase. Right away I yelled at Shelby NOT to run into the street, but by that point she was in a full-out flight-not-fight run and into the street she went. In one of those slow-motion moments, as I saw her hit the street, I heard a car coming from behind us and I yelled at the top of my lungs for her to stop. She didn't. But I think the driver of the car heard me (I yelled loud enough to make my throat sore) and stopped. Which was a good thing, because he never would have seen her in time. She sprinted out so suddenly and from behind my car nonetheless. I'm reasonably certain that she could have been serioiusly injured today had things gone just slightly different. Needless to say I'm quite thankful they didn't go differently.

My dad had to use the water hose to chase the puppies away. But that only worked on one of them. The other just kept coming. So he had to go into his work arsenal (he's a postal carrier), which includes a mild pepper spray (made for use on animals). I know it sounds cruel, but animal control doesn't work on Sundays, other means of scattering the strays were not effective, and given what happen with Shelby, taking them in was not on the list of options. Neither puppy was seriously injured in the making of this incident. They basically went to other people's yards and laid on their grass. We checked periodically but they never came closer than a couple yards over.