This is almost enough to make me want to have another baby. Almost.

A sampling of the havoc the new dogs have wrought on the household:

1. Buster, the smaller one, has taken to swimming. Berrigan, the bigger one, is a gigantic wuss and does not like this at all. He will stand on the top step with his feet in the water and paw at the emptiness in front of him, whining and begging Buster to come out of the evil pool.

2. Buster, spawn of Satan’s hounds, pushes through the fence and escapes on a regular basis. The neighbors (who undoubtedly think of us as the unruly hillbillies next door) have brought him back, clenching their cleft jaws and showing as few of their perfectly white teeth as possible.

3. The cats have been terrified into living in the basement, like some sort of shadow-dwelling rodents, only to appear at night while making piteous mewing sounds and twitching into 100-mph sprints at the merest hint of a wisp of a suggestion of a canine.

4. Both dogs are mad about stuffed animals. They have thus far shredded a frog (which reminds me of the killer toad I spotted out on the deck the other night, but that’s another story), and disemboweled Nemo the fish. They have a squeaky hedgehog, but that is not a preferred toy because they cannot sink their savage, wolf-like teeth far enough into its flesh. In addition to the layer of dog hair that now covers every surface in the house, there is the constant presence of cloud-like stuffing that has been ripped from the intestines of the now-deceased stuffed animals. The creepiest result to-date is the decapitation of Tigger. His body lies crumpled on the grass by the pool, just waiting for the lawn mower man’s blades to break him down into atomic sized particles. His head was lost for a while, and I thought perhaps it had been placed into a cryonic chamber along with Walt Disney’s, but reappeared last night when I turned a corner and found Berrigan sticking his snout into Tigger’s cranium, sucking out the last of his brains.