When our daughter was in first grade, my husband and I made a classic parenting mistake. With children aged 7 and 4, we decided that our kids were at the right stage in their young lives to get a dog.

They had been begging for a dog, praying for a dog, dressing up as dogs and talking about dogs nonstop. My husband grew up with dogs and cats in his house, so he knew what it was all about. I grew up with neither, but since we married we always had cats, so I figured a dog couldn't be that much more work, right? 

So the woman who compared six stroller brands for three months before choosing one and who spent hours on the Internet and paging through Consumer Reports before buying a car decided in all of about five minutes that a dog was a good idea.

No, not just a good idea. Necessary to the proper development of my children.  

In hindsight, I should have realized I'd only use the stroller for a few years and that the car might end up being replaced. The dog -- the good idea, necessary dog -- has a slightly longer lifespan. Yeah, that's one decision that could have used a little more thought.

Now before you go and think I'm a dog-hater, I'm not. But something quickly became clear to me that no one told me before we had a dog: Many dogs prefer adults, and even if you get a family-friendly breed or an amiable mutt, dogs don't always gravitate toward the kids.

So before I knew it, I was the proud owner of one used dog between the ages of 2 and 4. With no identifying information, the shelter didn't know his true age. The name he came with, and the name our kids wanted to keep, was Patch, although he has no patches. He was a slightly overweight pup that resembled a giant Chihuahua. 

A giant Chihuahua that from day one only had eyes for me.

We had made solid plans to get a dog that would enhance the children's lives. Patch wasn't having it. He was going to enhance my life, and that was about it.

The bad news for him is that I didn't need my life enhanced. I had just gotten to the point where my children no longer followed me around anymore, and now I was the proud owner of a dog who did just that. Every time I turned around, Patch was right there. Sit down? He's up on my lap. Folding laundry? He's staring at me, adoringly, from the other side of the ironing board.

I am apparently pretty darn fascinating. You don't know that about me, but Patch does. If I'm awake, he's right there with those big, bug-eyed baby browns intently focused on my next move.

As for the kids, they still love him all these years later, even if he mostly uses them as something to step on to get to me on the couch. My husband doesn't do much besides occasionally feed him because he's "mom's dog." And I've become used to having a shadow, even though I never, ever saw that coming.

So the secret that no one ever told me was that, in the end, the dog often really only likes mom.

And the secret I don't tell?

I didn't need a dog, but sometimes it's kind of nice to have something that thinks the sun rises when you get up and goes down when you go to sleep. As we count down the weeks until my oldest is officially a teenager, maybe having my No. 1 fan always by my side will turn out to be just what I needed -- even if I didn't know it.

It's an official first for us: We have a mouse in the house.

My husband reported seeing what he thought was a little bit of mouse droppings in the basement when he went to get down the Christmas decorations. I'm so glad he mentioned it because I had a mouse sighting last night that would have stopped my heart without a little advance notice.

I was curled up on the couch in our TV room with the dog by my side when I saw something shoot out from under the couch, over to the desk and right into one of the openings in the cold-air exchange at the base of the wall. I creeped over to the wall on my tippiest of tippy-toes to avoid contact with this little creature, but it had already disappeared into wherever that thing leads (which, my husband reports, is the basement).

After that there was about a half-hour of me turning all the lights off in the TV room, sneaking out of the room, waiting a few minutes and then -- bam! -- rushing back in with a quick flip of the light, hoping to catch that little bugger in the act of being in my house uninvited. I was sure this was the way to snag the mouse, although I had no weapon, no bucket or bowl, no box -- nothing to capture or trap it in. 

I'm not exactly sure what I was going to do if I did see it, but that didn't dawn on me at the time.

This morning I informed the kids that a little gray mouse was, in fact, spotted in the house -- in the room where they spend the most time. 

I bet you can guess what came after the mild horror.

"So Mom, if we find this mouse and we catch it, what are we going to do with it?" my son asked.

"If it's still alive, we'll put it outside," I responded, knowing full well this was really just the beginning of the conversation.

A little time passed.

"So Mom," the son tries again, "you said this mouse is very small, right? It's really cold outside and it might not live. Since it's so small and all, maybe we could keep it? Like a pet?"

Then we had to have the talk about why wild animals (even cute little mice) aren't good to keep in your house as pets. Why letting him go is really the right thing to do. And why, no matter how much they'd try to convince me that they would, I wouldn't buy them promising and pinkie-swearing that they would clean the little mouse's cage. 

I'm wise to this game. I mentioned that we have a dog, right?

So now we're all on Mouse Watch at our house, with children reporting that they've seen the mouse running all around the first floor and under the Christmas tree. One swears he heard squeaking.