One baby + One doggy = Two destroyers

When I was in university, I read From Baghdad, with Love. It is a story of a US military officer who picked up a stray dog while serving in Iraq and took it back home. I was moved as I read that the dog, named Lava, used to sleep beside the officer's little son and protect him, just like the military officer had protected the dog in Iraq.

Yet I realized not all pet-and-child stories are similar when I had my daughter, who was born one year after I and my wife had adopted a puppy - half Yorkshire, half local Chinese breed. If our dog's naughtiness knows no bounds, our daughter's energy seems limitless.

Since the day the dog entered our house, I have not put on a pair of shoes without holes in them. And after it chewed my expensive sofa twice, I had to buy a cheap one to minimize the possible future losses.