Our dog gets depressed. (I feel like the next line should be about puppy Prozac or doggie therapy.) Chance has been a little high maintenance since we adopted him, with skin allergies and hot spots, a heart murmur, constipation and an oft-bum tail. But he's a great dog -- very easygoing -- and wonderful with Emma (after those initial crawling months when he was terrified) and OK with the cats (after those initial months when he was terrified).

We try to be good dog owners, we really do. He had to give up jumping on the furniture when Emma was born, and there were some episodes as he adjusted to not being the dominant object of affection in the house. But he gets to run with Adam every other day, has frequent weekend walks, a large backyard and all the vet-prescribed food he can eat. Plus lots of brushing, petting and being beckoned from room to room by a 3-year-old. He sleeps in the house, and with Adam working from home, can be indoor or out as often as he likes. He's got it pretty good.

Or so we thought, until friends started dogsitting for us. They've got a young Lab (Chance is a border collie mix) and no kids. Pepper is their child. And when Chance visits, he is, too. They take a 2- to 6-mile walk twice a day. They have run of the house and each other. And he couldn't be happier there. It's like he gets a vacation at the same time we do.

Only he's not overjoyed to come home. This past week, Chance has been moping around like we took away his best friends. And I guess, we did. We don't live near a wilderness park like they do, so his off-leash animal chases are mostly limited to weekend trips to campus or the Duck Pond. And we certainly don't have time to walk him a couple of hours each day. They're better dog owners than we are, there's no doubt. And I'm glad they're so willing to keep -- and treat -- him for us.

But that doggie guilt sucks. He OD'd on grass this week, puking constantly, and even pooped in the floor (which he hasn't done since Em was a newborn). And it's not just the physical ailments; it's that longing look in his eyes. He wants the life he has with Pepper and our friends. But he's stuck with two cats, a pushy preschooler and us. Poor Chance.

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And in more depressing animal news, we have a mole. Or moles. Adam had been dosing the runs with poison before our trip, quite unsuccessfully. (And after a little mole research, I've learned it was a total waste of time.) We returned to a yard full of dirt patches. Adam called around yesterday about having a "mole guy" come and take care of it for us, but boy, is that expensive. So we're going to look into buying some traps and trying to get rid of it ourselves.

We'll have to check them after Emma's bedtime, though. All of her books have cute little moles who get packages from bunny postmen or run races with wombats. I can't imagine that she'd like to see the skewered rodent. (She quickly picked up that the poison was to kill the mole, though we never used that word. We just said we wanted him out of the yard.) We did encounter a tiny dead bird on a sidewalk in Albuquerque, and we're still talking about the poor, poor bird. Even with her glee in squashing ants (and how many times can I say, "There's no reason to kill the bug, honey; it doesn't hurt us"), she surely wouldn't be happy about the impaling.

Adam and I are game for it, though. Our yard is a disaster.

Already, Emma's making me realize what huge gaps there were in my education. I figured when she was in junior high and working on algebra, I'd feel like a dolt. Whatever I'd once known about equations is long gone. But, surprisingly, it's happening at age 3. And it's only going to get worse, I assume.

The good thing is, she's forcing me to constantly be a learner. And there's some fun in that.

Emma wants to know the name of everything. She's constantly yelling, "Look, there's a robin!" Or "Another Bradford pear tree, Mom!" But she's already exhausted what little knowledge I have about the outside world. She knows roses and tulips, dandelions and pansies. I'm constantly doing random Google searches, trying to figure out what kind of tree has that gorgeous peeling bark, revealing the silver-white skin underneath, with huge five-lobed (do I even have the terminology right?) leaves, and drops those pokey ball things. Anyone?

I can't tell her what that little black bird is -- I can identify woodpeckers, bluejays, sparrows, crows ... and that's about it -- or list the name of the blooming bush.

So I need a primer, folks. Mostly trees and birds, since those are her fascination right now. I wasted a lot of time trying to ID that tree yesterday and never really figured it out. (It might be a sugar maple.) But I'd like to have a book, or even a website, that we could check together. Learn together. I'm not embarrassed to not know, but I am a little embarrassed to not be able to easily find out. So is there a Trees for Dummies? A guide to Oklahoma songbirds?

And should I know this? Am I blanking out on a couple of years of elementary school, or is this just knowledge my parents didn't impart?

At least I'm good at that spelling stuff.

New Emma's favorites are listed in the sidebar. It's hard not to list 20 books at once ...

As always, we're looking for suggestions. Let us know what you listen to, watch or read -- chapter or picture book -- with your kids! Or what your childhood favorites are. (Tiny Coconut has a good recent thread about this.)

And you can see all Em's favorites (plus the library list we were doing before) here.

Getting back into the rhythm of work today ... and going through the giant stack of mail that accumulated while I was gone. One returned envelope -- a package of information I'd sent about an upcoming meeting -- was empty, with a "forward time expired" sticker on it. There's a handwritten note from another staffer on it: "I resent this."

It took me a minute of gaping, wondering why she resented the envelope. Did she want to be invited to the meeting? Was she unhappy I'd solicited this alum's help?

It was only after I'd started sorting through other stuff that it dawned on me: She re-sent it. It came back, probably to her office since the envelopes have the whole college's address on them, and she re-sent it for me to the address marked on it.

See, the power of a hyphen.

We're home, safe, sound and exhausted. Life with a 3-month-old is just as tiring as I fuzzily remember it to be. Emma had a great time with Baby Tommy (she automatically confers the title "baby" onto anyone who's more than six months younger than she is), and we were impressed at how willing she was to share the spotlight.

Emma was quite the little mother. Before we left, she'd had some specific ideas of things she'd like to help with:

"Maybe when Baby Tommy gets hungry, I can feed him a bottle."
"Remember, Em, Aunt Sally nurses Tommy. He doesn't eat from a bottle."
"Well, maybe if I ask her really nicely, I can nurse him."
"Only mommies can nurse babies, Emma."
"But I'll ask really nicely."

Even if she couldn't nurse Tommy, though, she's all about nursing now. Her stuffed cat is spending a lot of time pressed to her bare chest -- that is, when it's not peeing and pooping in its imaginary diaper. And crying. Boy, does that cat cry.

Emma was pretty distressed to learn that it's not always easy to keep a baby from crying. Tommy had had a long morning at the Albuquerque aquarium and cried most of the car ride home. Once Emma decided to try to help (at first, she said she couldn't entertain him because she had a drink in one hand and a pressed penny in the other), she started by singing. The more he cried, the louder he sang. She kept announcing, "He's still crying!" to Sally and I, and by the end of the drive, was on the edge of tears herself. She just didn't get why she couldn't fix it.

We're all worn out today, though. Emma, who slept in a cool inflatable sleeping bag next to our bed, woke every time Tommy did in the night. And then it would start a vicious cycle --- turning on her bedtime CD to get Em back to sleep often kept Tommy awake. So no one slept much. And we had to get up at 5:30 a.m. yesterday to start the trek home; luckily, there were no five-hour delays this time around. On the way out, we sat in the Oklahoma City airport an extra hour waiting on a late plane and then on the runway in Dallas more than three hours hoping that storms would pass. They eventually did, of course, and Emma was a doll in the meantime. Thank god I'd brought James and the Giant Peach along. We quickly exhausted all of the picture books.

And it's not only that we didn't get as much sleep as usual -- we crammed a lot in. (You can see pics from most of the activities on Em's site.) Friday, a trip to the Albuquerque zoo. Saturday, the aquarium and botanical gardens. Sunday, a tram ride up Sandia Mountain and some light hiking. (Emma was quite impressed by herself. "I'm such a good little hiker!") Plus visiting other ABQ friends, many meals at restaurants Adam and I loved from our year in New Mexico and driving around to point out exciting things like, "We used to shop there!" Luckily, Em's still young enough to be fascinated by any story we tell.

Today, though, things are back to normal. Or back to the new normal. Actually, the temporary normal. Em's at the house with her new in-home day-care provider. She'll do two full weeks with that and then preschool starts and we'll all adjust to the new schedule. So on to the new ...