There’s something special about the way men fall in love with animals. Particularly big, broad-shouldered men.

I’ve seen it before: my dad, despite being openly disappointed in his children’s decision in the late ’80s to choose a small black poodle at the RSPCA over more masculine dogs, came to love Paddy dearly. In fact, Paddy’s untimely death a few years later was one of the few times I’ve ever seen my dad cry, and was certainly the first time I’d ever heard him say he’d miss someone.

He also has a very fond relationship with my parents only remaining cat, a female Burmese called Tom.  Tom is small, but very heavy because she is all muscle from years of turning her nose up at Whiskers and hunting for live rabbit. Dad loves Tom, Tom loves Dad. Dad respects her independence and they have a similar pain threshold. My dad has returned from work dragging many a broken bone before and so when Tom returned from a hunting trip with a very limp tale, Dad did what he would want someone to do for him: grabbed her, put her tail back in place and let her get on with things. Her tail now stands tall and proud.

B is a board-shouldered man and he has fallen very hard in love with Delilah.

I have lost count of the number of times he has cooed sweet sentiments and I’ve blushed and said, ‘Babe! That’s so sweet of yo- …wait. Are you talking to me or the dog? Oh.’.

In the mornings I get up to the site of him wearing Delilah around his neck like a stole. He trims her claws and defends her from The Wuz and hasn’t exactly said I’m not allowed buy her clip-on bows to wear in her hair. When we go out for brunch, he orders her chicken from the kitchen and organises puppy play dates with other cuties (and their equally cute puppies).

A few nights ago The Wuz and I sat on the couch and watched disdainfully as B and Delilah wrestled on the floor. We don’t need their love.

*sniff*

This weekend will be the real test of Delilah’s cute though: she’s meeting Dad for the first time, a vocal critic of a) corgis and b) his children owning any kind of pet. History would suggest though, that she’ll melt his heart.

Living in a two people, one cat, one puppy household means our days start before the sun comes up and ends well after it sets, but finally I have time for an update:

- Delilah came to us able to fetch and sit on command. In the last week she’s gotten big enough to fit her mouth around a tennis ball, which means she brings it to you when you’re lying on the couch blobbing out and drops it at your feet and looks at you with her gorgeous puppy eyes and suddenly you have the energy for one more park visit;

- She loves big dogs. She loves to get them to chase her and then she stands underneath them so they can’t catch her … except for Sky, her Husky friend, who’s discovered when she does that, he can just sit on her;

- It took her two weeks, but she’s finally acknowledged there is a cat in the house;

- Now she eats the cat’s food whenever she gets the chance;

- She can undo the fly of your jeans by sitting on your lap and digging at the zipper. She loves doing this;

- Yesterday her cage door wasn’t locked properly and she spent the day roaming the house. When we came home we discovered Bad Things, like a bottle of shampoo under the lounge and an out-of-print sci-fi novel with its edges nibbled. We discovered a Good Thing that made this all ok: despite being out of her pen, she still returned to it to pee. The puppy is housetrained! We can leave her out all weekend when we’re home! This is such great news for us and our carpet!

Today I was discussing dating protocol with a friend, and imparting what little wisdom I have on the matter, when suddenly I remembered a fantastic example from my past where a guy I was meeting up with told me he were close by and then just never showed up, never messaged, never called. It was a total Chuck Cunningham Syndrome moment.

A few months later I was talking to my then-therapist (I wasn’t seeing a therapist because of  Chuck, the laughs I’ve gotten from telling that date story more than made up for it) and she asked me to make a list of what I wanted in a relationship and it was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life.

Nowhere on the list was children.

Very high on my list was not living in the city forever and owning a dog, having someone who it felt like I was on a team with, someone who made me laugh and was kind.

Nowhere on my list was earning big bucks, but having enough to travel was a priority.

I was telling my friend about the list today, saying everyone should make one and then use it when they feel unsure about a person.

It gave me reason to think about my list.

Chronic illness knocked on the head what little desire I might have had for children and I’m still super happy with my decision.

I have a boyfriend who makes me laugh many times a day and who keeps my worries in check to the point where I hardly have any and when I do, I can see them far more logically than I’ve ever been able to before.

We’re going to Japan in December and will spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Tokyo.

We both have jobs that satisfy us and allow us to do things like take trips.

He’s my best friend and favourite person to be around.

For months we’ve been talking about moving further out from the city, somewhere that allowed us a lot more space, was a move in the direction we want to eventually take and it would mean we could get a dog.

For months we discussed dogs and what kind we’d like to get, settling pretty early on a corgi.

About 5 weeks ago I contacted a woman who shows corgis and very occasionally sells them if they can’t be shown. I expected she’d tell me to wait until next year, but instead she had a pup who she might want to sell in a few weeks.

We waited anxiously for about two weeks and then she contacted us and asked us if we wanted to buy the pup we’d already been calling Delilah.

We picked her up on Saturday and she’s gorgeous.

And now we are four …

On Wednesday night we took The Wuz to the vet because she is long overdue for vaccinations and I wanted some advice on how to overcome Newtown’s notorious flea problem.

It was never going to be fun, The Wuz hates traveling in cars and cried the whole way there and no amount of Dark Crystal fandom from the receptionist was going to persuade her everything was ok (The Wuz’s “official” name is Fizzgig).

She sneezed on the vet, she ran away from the vet, she didn’t want to get weighed, she had two needles, a flea tablet and a worm table and she was pissed.

Thursday was the first day in a long time I didn’t trip over her on my way to the bathroom, which I thought was strange and when she eventually walked down the hallway, it was clear something was really wrong. She was walking like she was drunk and her eyes couldn’t focus and when I picked her up she meowed like she was in pain and scared.

Having never seen her sick, I didn’t know what my response would be. Now I do: I crawled into bed and cried.

Thankfully, B was there and took charge. This is a man who is mildly allergic to cats and lives with one who frequently sneezes on him, yet who has taken to her with great gusto. This is a man who frequently works with her sitting on his lap, or creepily watching him from her perch, the man who I overheard calling her ‘sweetheart’ one night recently as he tried to shoo her back in out backyard.

He took her to the vets and they gave her an injection to get her temperature down and kept her for observation. He rang at lunch time to check on her. He came with me last night to pick her up and give me moral support while the vet talked about what a bad patient Wuz was.

Then we took her home and gave her lots of hugs and kisses and she seems well on her way back to normal Wuzness.

We love you, Wuzzy!

I am terrible at keeping secrets, even my own. We’ve had some really good news which we can share very, very, very soon.

In the mean time, here’s another hint …

“Do NOT get a dog. Just don’t do it. It is the worst thing to do, getting a dog. Don’t get a dog, they will tie you down.” – says Dad, the man who was married at 21 and had three children well before he turned 30.

He says this while cradling two of his three grandchildren, just after we’ve discussed the dread my older sister is feeling about her impending international travel with a five-month-old.

“Easier to kennel a dog than a kid.” – says me, 31, owner of no children but in possession of a bowl of corn chips.

Dad stares into space. “That is true, you can’t kennel a kid, I suppose.”.

Living with a partner the second time around isn’t as difficult as I expected.

It’s nice having someone cooking breakfast while I get ready for work, or high-fiving me when I get home from guitar lessons, or fixing our weird indoor slug problem and figuring out what the odd smell is under the sink.

I like watching B potter by when I get up at 5am to watch my basketball team lose spectacularly, and doing the washing up together and making our own media folder where we can share music, and watching The Mindy Project in bed with my headphones on, because it’s not his bag, but we’re really good at having alone time when we’re together.

It’s nice sharing my life with someone who barely raises an eyebrow when I electrocute myself one night or set my hairdryer on fire the next.

We have a couple of really exciting plans coming up, which I am not at liberty to discuss yet as we’re waiting for a few pieces of news late next week and I don’t want to be all “Hey, this!” and then “Hey! Not this, boohoo!”.

Here is a hint, though:

Last weekend I went to visit my younger sister, who’s just moved into a house with her husband and daughter, Cordelia. I specify house because until recently they were living in a one-bedroom flat, which despite being lovely, was a small heat box that may or may not have once been a stable. They needed to move because someone (Cordelia) likes to wake up at 3am (Cordelia) and talk to herself in baby-talk (Cordelia), really, really loudly.

When they went to visit my parents recently, Cordelia got a room to herself and just before 9pm, my phone lit up with a message from Steph:

Steph is someone who likes sleep, a lot of sleep, all the time with the sleeping, so sharing a room with a baby was obviously not optimal and thus in their new place, Cordelia has a room of her own and her mother has never been happier.

My older sister and her husband and their two kids were there as well and it was good to see The Nerdphew, who had allegedly been asking to hang out with me.

Knowing that he finds adults talking boring and that the two babies are not yet up to playing games with him, I decided to play a few rounds of hide-and-seek with him. This is how he plays:

He orders everybody to count to ten and then runs away and hides and starts giggling manically. I began to hunt him down, assuming he wanted me to pretend I couldn’t see him sticking out from under a chair. I walked around loudly pondering where he could be, asking hypothetical questions about his location, like, “IS VINCENT IN CORDELIA’S ROOM?” to which came from under the chair a loud, “NO!”.

I thought I had the four-year-old audience on lock, but when I pondered whether Vincent was hiding in the toilet, he got disgusted with me and start to wriggle out from under the chair to yell at me for thinking he’d be so gross as to get in the toilet. Instead of listening to him, I sat on him and wondered aloud where he could be, which changed the game and meant to when it was my turn to hide, he wanted to find me immediately so he could sit on me.

V is a kid that needs constant stimulation. He’s like a shark, he needs to constantly be moving and touching things and speaking very loudly and throwing things and asking questions about things and when we all left, it warmed my heart when V charged off down the hill in his gumboots and my sister called out for him to wait while they got his little sister set up in her pram and he came back, grudgingly, to explain he wanted to jump in the really, really big puddle at the end of the street and instead of chastising him or telling him no, my sister looked up, saw the huge puddle, looked at her son the shark and shrugged and said, “Ok, sure, just give me a sec.”.

The last I saw of them as I drove of was the four of them, walking along post-puddle splash, chatting and looking in on Lexi in her stroller and V gesticulating and talking in his booming voice, probably about puddles and toilets.

In the middle of my crazy working hours, B moved in and we almost straight away went on holidays, which means this week feel like the first time we’ve actually really lived together.

So far it’s going really well, The Wuz in particular has enjoyed having a newbie to flirt with for additional food. I don’t need to lower myself to her levels, I simply ask B to feed me more.

After having three housemates in a row who I was more than happy to let decorate the shared spaces as I had no particular preference about how they looked, I decided to tentatively attempt some lounge room decoration this time around and have turned it into shrine to Americana, with some prints by Alabama photographer, Ryan Russell, and long-time Nine Inch Nails collaborator, Rob Sheridan, as well as my (un)trusty bright pink Gipper bust by Frank Kozik.

With work easing up, I’m looking forward to the colder weather and spending it snuggled up with my two favourites, watching the entire Coen Brothers back catelogue.