Lorelai's Pets Plus Plants Paradise (Her Words)

Our summer vacation this year was light on the "big" (out-of-state trips, etc.) but heavy on the "little things"...day trips, sports clubs, pool time, play dates with friends. Nathan and I were each able to take a few-days' trip away from Arizona (more on that in a later post), but the girls were "stuck" in Sahuarita for the summer. Thankfully, the girls have borne this in good spirits, and have managed to have fun despite the sometimes monotonous days and unrelentingly hot weather.

Lorelai did more than just have fun, though...she started up a successful business! She is getting to that age where she's not quite old enough to baby-sit for other families, but definitely old enough to want additional challenges & responsibilities. She also wanted to find a way to earn some extra money while doing something she loved. With a little guidance from Nathan and myself, she ended up doing a lot of pet-sitting/house-sitting this summer.

When she first started formulating her idea, Lorelai told me she wanted to do a "dog-walking" business. Lorelai loves dogs, and she (along with her sisters) has been anxiously waiting for our family to get one (*just a few more months, girls, I promise!*). Anyway, Lorelai thought a dog-walking business would help her get some valuable experience in working with dogs, which would both earn her some money and prepare her for our own dog, whenever it should arrive.

Nathan and I liked the dog-walking idea, but didn't think the concept would net her a ton of business...particularly in the hot hot summer. I explained to Lorelai that in the summer, lots of families need pet-sitters, because they are often traveling out of town and can't take their animals with them. The same was true of plants and gardens...vacationers needed help watering and tending their crops. So, with a little persuasion, we convinced Lorelai to market her services as an all-purpose pet/house-sitter. She was not as thrilled to be taking care of plants as she was of dogs; on the other hand, though, the thought of keeping dogs at our home overnight was very appealing to her.

Lorelai named her business "Lorelai's Pets Plus Plants Paradise" (or "LPPP," for short. No, I don't know what happened to the fourth "P"). We didn't print business cards or anything, but as it turned out, a little advertising on Facebook (and among our friends) ended up going a long way. We had one or two families express interest immediately, and we kept adding jobs throughout the summer. For the entire month of July, Lorelai always had at least one or two tasks to fulfill every day...whether it was walking a dog staying at our house, feeding a cat at another house, watering the outside plants at yet another house...she did it all!

 

Here's a rundown of all Lorelai's "clients" for the year:

 

--Maz, a spunky Labrador mix. We watched her on two separate weekends, and fell in love with her right away. She wasn't even a year old yet, so she was very active and rowdy, which was totally fun but also wore us out a bit!

 

--Skippy and Tesa, two adorable miniature Schnauzers. Each dog belongs to a different family (both friends of ours); however, both families were to be out of town for the Fourth of July, so they called on us for help!

Despite their similar appearance, their temperaments were quite different; Tesa was more high-strung and "needy" (she often hogged the cuddles!), while Skippy was quieter and more reserved. But it was still fun having both dogs over; it gave the girls more furry friends to hug.

 

 

--Mufasa and Lady, a Yorkie and a Spaniel mix, respectively. They are both the pets of a family in our LDS ward. They left town for over a week, so these two adorable little dogs were our houseguests for eight days (I missed some of that time myself, as I was in San Diego when they arrived; Nathan ended up helping Lorelai with most of their care).

Lady was a very shy, sensitive dog, but she ended up worshipping Lorelai (likely because Lorelai was literally "the hand that fed her"); Mufasa, however, was an outgoing, charming fellow, and everyone in the family fell in love with him (and so did many of our visitors that week!).

 

 

--Annabeth, the goat! This was definitely our most interesting pet-sitting experience of the summer. A family in our ward, who owns a large chunk of land, has raised several goats over the years. As of this summer, they were down to Annabeth and her two kids, Isaiah and Ava.

They also kept several chickens, and had a few feral cats slinking around. And they had a pet turtle and a large garden as well! We were responsible for stopping by the homestead at least once a day, sometimes twice (we split the duties with the Sparks family, but on some days we needed to do both shifts).

 

Every morning at this home, we had to feed the cats, feed the turtle, feed the chickens, and feed the goats, we also had to milk Annabeth!

This experience proved to me, maybe once and for all, that I am not the "farmer's daughter" my father probably wishes I was. Milking was a very stressful, traumatic experience for me; I spilled a lot of the milk, and wasn't able to get much out of poor Annabeth before she lost patience with me and started tapping her hooves all around, trying to knock the pail over and terrorize the lot of us. It took Lorelai and I a few days before we figured out the "rhythm" to milking, and we did get better at it over time. Lorelai proved herself a much better milker than myself; I think she improved daily and might have made a pretty good milker if we were to take on the job full-time. However, since we only milked her a handful of times, we never really got enough milk out of Annabeth to do much with. And the girls didn't much like the taste of the milk, either.

 However, in spite of our semi-incompetence, there was something very fulfilling about taking milk home that we had milked ourselves. We sterilized it and then used it in a few recipes (I made pancakes out of it on one occasion, for instance). Besides the milk, we were also able to take home whatever eggs the hens had laid that day. We didn't need to buy eggs for a while! And we were also free to pick any fresh fruits or vegetables the garden produced while we were caring for everything else. We got several delicious cucumbers and a juicy cantaloupe for our troubles! Working at this home was definitely more involved and exhausting than most of our other assignments, but it was possibly the most rewarding as well.

These were probably the most "involved" of Lorelai's job assignments this summer. But she had a lot of other jobs, too (many of which didn't get pictures, so I'm going to list them below):

--She fed two ferrets, the pets of more family friends. The ferrets stayed at their own home, so Lorelai dropped by daily for a few days to check on them and play with them a little bit. There was also a fish there that was fed daily.
--We also fed the cat of still another family friend for a week while they were away. Zariah was a very shy cat who we rarely saw, but she always cleaned off her plate after we left! There was another fish at this home to feed, too.
--Mufasa and Lady had a cat "brother" named Boots, who remained back at the family home. Lorelai had to visit the home every day to feed the cat and change his litter box; she also had to water all the plants in the family's backyard...and it was a pretty lush, elaborate garden.
--Lorelai also watered the outdoor plants of two different family friends; one family was away for about ten days, and another for close to three weeks!

The plant-watering jobs ended up being more involved then we'd originally assumed, due to the unusual weather. This has been a particularly hot summer, with very little relief. You're probably thinking, "Adrianne, you complain about the heat every year!", but this year has been particularly rough (really!). Our monsoon (rainy) season has been very erratic and much drier than usual; the rains that usually cool things off in July/August have simply never materialized (with the exception of three or four especially stormy days). The result has been day after day after day of blistering high temperatures with very little relief. Those plants definitely needed Lorelai's tender loving care.

Since many of the homes we visited were a good distance from our own, I spent quite a bit of time driving Lorelai around to fulfill her duties. This sometimes got a little hectic and exhausting, but it was also invigorating in a way...I was helping my daughter with her job! As you can imagine, the Fourth of July weekend was Lorelai's busiest weekend of the year, due to so many families traveling out of town at that time. We had three or four different visits to make each day that weekend, and on top of celebrating the holiday, it got pretty exhausting!

 

 

At least we found time to have a big barbecue dinner with our friends the Tonks (they're a family who moved into the area a little more than a year ago), and catch Sahuarita's fireworks show that night...as well as setting off some of our own!

 

Throughout all our driving/walking from house to house, Lorelai remained professional and eager to work (she may have grumbled once or twice during our early-morning days, but she did all the actual work without complaint). I was so impressed to see what a responsible girl she was becoming. She was especially happy working with all the dogs (no big surprise there); she loved taking them on walks and usually insisted on doing that herself, without her sisters' help. She quickly developed a good rapport with each dog, winning their trust and also their affection. This was true even of our most shy critters; they loved her!

Her last pet-sitting job actually overlapped somewhat with the beginning of school; by then she was very grateful for the work to be winding down (she had SIXTH grade to think about at this point, after all). However, she was grateful for the many opportunities she had to work and earn some extra cash. We tried to keep Lorelai's work rate at a reasonable limit; however, some families ended up offering her way more than we had ever planned on asking for! When all her summer earnings were totaled up, she ended up with more than $350! Not bad for a ten-year-old kid.

So what did Lorelai do with her hard-earned dough? Paid tithing on it immediately. And then she put half of it in her savings account, because she wanted to "save some for college." I was impressed and touched by her mature, responsible way of managing her finances.She also set a good example for her younger sisters, who have also started talking about "jobs" they want to do in the future, as well as things they'd like to save up money for.

 I know Lorelai's edging ever closer to that magical birthday number 12 (she'll be able to babysit! Yay!), but I think she went a long way to developing a proper work ethic this summer. I am so grateful to have such an awesome girl for a daughter, and I can't wait to see her, and her sisters, find great opportunities like this in future summers.