It has got to suck to be my son this week.
At the best of times he lives in a house full of women, and as so is subjected to lots of conversations about female puberty, periods, and whenever we discuss the male body, there is usually an audience of his sisters.
Whilst I feel for him, I also feel that he should know everything about everything, not just his own rite of passage through puberty.
Same for the girls.
It is just, well, there are more of us….
And this week the dog got involved.
Yup, little Rosie became a woman, and to mark the occasion she is currently ovulating on my kitchen floor. The street is full of barking suitors as they almost dislocate their owners shoulder as they walk past my door from what must be her pungent come get me odour.
The dog is ovulating on my floor.
It’s grim, all of the household is relatively disgusted, the cats just sit upon the worktops and stare first at her, then at me, silently mocking me in the way only cats can. My son has taken to living in his room, my eldest daughter is now terrified for herself, and my youngest likes to shout, “have the sex Rosie, and stop the bleeding.”
The poor dog, on her third day of house arrest, looks like she needs a kingsize bar of Dairy Milk and a pint of Pinot Grigio. She has taken her first season to the extreme, and has gorged on grass till she was sick, and has drunk so much that it has caused excessive diarrhoea.
You can only imagine how my house smells.
You probably can’t imagine how much I have spent at the vets to clarify that yes she is just miserable and making herself ill because she has her period.
When they stuck a thermometer up her arse the look she gave me was venomous.
I knew her time of the month was coming, Rosie is almost 15 months old, so she is late to the whole being in season thing. And I was prepared for the signs, which frankly are obvious, she has been laid on her bed crying at sad movies, getting angry at harmless comments and asking for a hot water bottle for 48 hours.
It has been a great week to explain the birds and the bees, possibly not in as much detail as I did to the seven year old, but none the less we have all learnt something.
My son, this morning, sighed at the small drops of red on the slate floor, ‘it’s still going on?’ he said with a touch of disgust.
The cats (all male), refusing to walk on the floor, looked at him with cat-like empathy and again turned to me with a full on ‘why the hell did you get a dog’ grimace.
My youngest turned to him and cried..
“Be nice, you know…
It is so unfair, only women bleed.”
I’m raising a good one there!