This is why we can’t have nice things.

I live in a nice house, at least it would be nice if it weren’t for us deciding that we wanted to share it with three rascal dogs and a danger baby.  I don’t think that I am  excessive in my house proudness but I feel as if I am fighting a losing battle most of the time.  My current sources of annoyance/money wasting/fist shaking/tear shedding are the bay window in our living room and the back garden.

The bay window had wooden blinds up.  Due to biggest rascal having a grudge match with the postman that shows no signs of dulling, the blinds took a daily beating from his great big, angry face.  Then danger baby discovered the window sill.  I witnessed giant rascal at one side yelling at the potential intruder and danger baby at the other using all of his hulk strength to snap bits off the blinds.  From the outside our house was starting to look horrible.  I did some research, went and bought PVC blinds and thick net curtains to hang behind them and hoped for the best.

It looked lovely.  It lasted less than a week.  Danger baby found snapping PVC easier than wood, a day of annoying leaflet drops (half a forest of pointless things get thrust through our door a week)  the nets were shredded and the blinds snapped in half.  I went back to the shop and attacked the display blinds viciously (shop assistant looked as if they were going to call in a manager)  and decided that aluminium would be the best to not snap and stand up to my idiot members of the family who have a desire to make us look like the trampiest family on the street.

I am a hopeful fool.  They are totally destroyed after a week.  I have spent an alarming amount of money on them all for no reason.  Now I am no Hyacinth Bucket, (I may have been seen shouting “no more fucking leaflets!!!” through the window as stupid giant rascal broke another bit of blind yesterday, at a terrified woman at my door….I am awaiting a sign in the post that tells them all nicely to bugger off) but I really want the house to look nice.

I have tried curtains, the curtain rail was no match for mega dog and lasted two days before it was pulled out of the wall.  I am considering metal, fortress style shutters, but I can’t find them easily on the internet and I am not sure they will look all that nice….

Then there is the garden.  Lovely boyfriend has spent a serious amount of time making it gorgeous out there.  Danger baby loves to be outside and every day after breakfast can be found, wellies in hand, waiting to go outside and play.  I wanted there to be a dog free zone in the garden so that the smallest member of the family could play without me worrying about him jumping up and down in dog wee puddles.

So lovely boyfriend dug up the entire lawn and started again with grass seed.  He bought giant building site fences to ensure the rascal contingent couldn’t get onto it and get seed stuck in their paws and destroy the fledgling lawn.

Which took a bit of perfecting……  But with the help of baby gates cable tied on to the fence, we achieved.  And the hard work paid off, a luscious green lawn arrived within a month.  We all looked lustily at it through the fence until lovely boyfriend finally agreed that we could play on it.  The rascals all ran on it it, did a wee and scraped up big chunks of grass.  I did wonder if lovely boyfriend was going to have a little cry, he looked as if he might want to punch them all a bit.   Luckily for our team of destruction experts, lovely boyfriend is lovely and wouldn’t actually punch them, even though I am very sure they probably deserved it.

So he decided that we needed a fence ( I already knew that we did, but he had thought my initial idea of keeping the dogs off the lawn was mean….).  The rascals could have the patio area and the small one the grass, as he is slightly less likely to ruin the grass, or at least it will take him much longer than the others as his claws are rubbish in comparison to theirs.   Garden improvement costs lots of money.  I was very shocked at how much they expect people to pay, but we needed to do something or all of the hard work that lovely boyfriend had done was going to be ruined.  So we bit the bullet and gave all of our money (whatever we had left after buying lots of blinds)  to the garden centre.

I have planted strawberries, tomatoes and some pretty flowers in the border planters as the dogs had been denied access so they wouldn’t stand on/eat/dig up/wee on them.  We had nearly a week of proudly standing at the back door and looking outside happily.  I had even started looking out of little man’s bedroom window,  (the neighbours beautiful garden no longer pained me to look at in comparison to our own mud pit of doom) as now, we had a lovely, green, safe place to offer the dangerous tiny one and a clean jolly area for the rascals to run in circles without losing all of the grass.

Both of the biggest rascals have learned to jump the bloody fence.  I am trying not to use expletives around the tiny one as I want him to have a broad vocabulary which he can introduce fun swearing into once he is a big boy, not teach him statements such as “oh you thunder cunting bastard dogs, get the fuck off the lawn!!!!!!”  But sometimes I can’t seem to stop these things popping out of my face.

Luckily for my family, I love them all so much that although I may have threatened to turn them all into rugs on jumping the fence day, I couldn’t actually ever do that.  I know that my best bet would be to massively lower my expectations,  just give up on having anything hanging in the front windows at all and paint the mud in the garden green, but another part of me thinks that blinds and grass really aren’t too much to hope for….. are they?