The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, February 28th, the CSI American Girl Doll edition.

I'm Gabriel Roth. I am the editorial director of Slate Podcasts, and I am the father of Eliza, who is eight years old, and Leo, who is four. I'm Rebecca Lavoie. I'm a journalist and podcaster in New Hampshire, and I am mom to Henry, who is 17, Teddy, who is 16, and my stepdaughter, Lily, who is 18. And I'm Carvall Wallace, a writer and podcaster in Oakland, California, and I'm the father to Georgia who is 13, and Ezra, who is 15.

Today on our show, we have a question about an 11-year-old who's still wetting his bed.

And we have another question about a dad who is metaphorically wetting his bed.

Plus, as always, we'll have triumphs and fails.

We will make recommendations. On Slate Plus,

we're going to talk about dogs. Let's start with triumphs and fails. I have a fail and it's about a

dog, so I'm going to go first. We had a dog this weekend. The dog came to stay with us. If you're

a regular listener to this show, you will know that I have been fighting off attempts by my family to get another dog, not because I don't love dogs. I profoundly love dogs, but because my and my family's lifestyle cannot accommodate a dog. We'll talk about all of this more in the Slate Plus segment. This weekend, we were able to borrow a dog from some friends who were going skiing

for the weekend. He was a great dog. He was a puppy. He was a Labradoodle. He was eight months old. He was so sweet. My wife and the kids had met him before I did. I came home from work late on Friday night and I came in and he was so happy to see me. He had never met me before, but it was like I was his best friend.

It was so great.

And the kids loved the dog. Leo loved the dog. But Leo was nervous because the dog would sometimes jump on him. The dog is about as big as him. It was like, you know, he was just quite reasonably. Like he just was slightly wary of the dog, which is fine. and when he went to bed, he said he was worried that the dog was

going to come into his room and jump on him in the night. And I promised him that that would not happen

because I was going to be upstairs with the dog eating my dinner. And then afterwards, when I went to

bed, I was going to put the dog straight into his crate where the dog would stay and that the door to the crate would be shut and that everything was going to be fine.

And yet, as so often with the very specific promises I made to Leo, I failed to follow through.

The dog just went downstairs when I wasn't looking.

He went straight into the kid's bedroom.

He jumped up on Leo in the

middle of the night and he was woken up by like this big dog panting in his face and he was like,

oh, it's exactly the thing I didn't want to happen. And I could only apologize. So that's my

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