A Dog a Ham and Two Babies

A Dog, a Ham and Two Babies From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Twins and More

You can always find a capable helping hand at the end of your own sleeve.
~Zig Ziglar

When my daughter gave birth to my wonderful identical twin granddaughters, Elizabeth and Virginia, her other daughters were five and not quite two years old. Even with lots of help in those first weeks, how could anyone manage such a brood — the mountains of diapers, oceans of formula, and that horror of new parenthood, sleep deprivation? Just keeping everyone fed and dry was a storm of nonstop activity! The babies looked just alike, so there was the added job of identity to keep up with. This was accomplished by painting one tiny toenail. But was Elizabeth the one with the hot-pink pedicure or was it Virginia? Between you and me, I wonder to this day if Elizabeth might be Virginia and vice versa. But back to my story.

My daughter has a lot of stellar qualities, of course, but one that stands out — and is definitely genetic, if I may say so — is her resourcefulness. A boatload of personal experience in this department and a hopeful spirit told me that this trait would be her salvation. Still, as she fretted over the tiny newborns, I worried about her — my first baby — and I prayed every day that my intuition was not misguided. As it turned out, the resourcefulness gene (which has seen me and no doubt countless numbers of my ancestors through all manner of domestic crises) was tested soon after my sweet daughter and her husband left my house to spend their first night alone in the baby outback.

As I slept fitfully next to my phone and car keys in case I got a hysterical call from either my daughter or her husband during the night, the aforementioned parents were being pushed to their very limits. Their neighbor, it turned out, had skipped town or suffered some terrible physical trauma, leaving his dog barking non-stop in his back yard. The incessant baying eventually woke my sleep-deprived older granddaughters. And then the babies. The one- or two-hour reprieve between feedings and diaper changes (and, in some cases, crib sheet and pajama changes) evaporated into the night. As you know, so tired and brain-dead are new mothers, that a pack of howling hyenas cannot stir them once they actually close their eyes, but the first whimper of the newborn has them flying into action. So the poor, spent parents fed and changed and rocked and patted as the bark-a-thon next door thwarted their every effort.

By some miracle, the following morning found them all bleary-eyed and ill-humored, but alive. An all-but-comatose husband staggered to his car, the promise of the relative nirvana of delinquent deadlines and ringing phones in his baby-less office giving him the strength to get to work. Mom was spelled by family and managed a nap. Someone fed the family from the bounty of casserole charity in the freezer, and they all passed out.

And then it started. The horrible hound, madder than ever at being neglected, began to bark. The babies, thrown off their precious schedule, began to cry. The older girls woke up. Consciousness — much less a solution to the problem — was a cruel joke as far as my son-in-law was concerned. He was dead to the squalling world around him. The poor mother was on her own and at her wits' end.

Luckily, this is when the resourcefulness gene went into high gear. Remembering the lovely spiral-cut, honey-baked ham I had donated to her freezer, my darling daughter wrestled the fifteen-pound delicacy from the fridge, lugged it out into the night, pulled a lawn chair up to the fence and hurled it over. The barking stopped. And it never started again. By the time the hound had chewed through the wrapping, eaten the ham, slept off the unexpected feast, and started in on the bone, his master returned. Thanks to a heart-to-heart talk between my son-in-law and the negligent neighbor, the dog has never been left to bark away the night again.

You might be wondering if I questioned my daughter as to why she couldn't have thrown a pack of hot dogs or even a pound of bacon to the offending mutt instead of my lovingly chosen and very expensive ham. Tempting though it was, I thought better of it. She did what she had to do. The ham served its primary, though not original, purpose. It helped her get through a difficult time. Besides, I really didn't want to know whether she had thrown that frozen missile to the dog or at the dog.

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