The internet told me recently that I won’t love my puppy in three months time. He’s not a puppy; he’s an indeterminate age. When my husband and I adopted him, a carpenter who was building us a bookshelf grabbed his muzzle, looked at the plaque on his teeth, and told us he was four. We’ve counted birthdays from that date, but he’ll always be a puppy—that’s how much I love him.

In about three months, after nine months of cooking, another little creature’s going to enter my life (chubbier, less hairy, with a different battery of noises and excretions) and, according Allison Benedikt of Slate, I’ll then rue the day I got Branston Pickle (named after the English condiment). “The One Thing No One Tells You Before You Have Kids: Don’t Get a Dog,” read the headline of the piece she published on Monday, which had more than 4,000 comments last time I checked. “A very nonscientific survey of almost everyone I know who had a dog and then had kids now wishes they had never got the dog,” she writes. Once she entered this demographic … “It’s not that I don’t love my dog. It’s just that I don’t love my dog.”

I can’t begin to parse all the objections that might have been raised in those thousands of comments, but here’s one more: Getting a dog was the primary thing that convinced me I could handle kids—or rather reassured me that my husband was capable of the endeavor. How do you enter that catch-22 into the kids-v.-dogs calculus?

My husband and I have the same, boring, sadly gender-delineated squabbles that lots of couples have: I think that I cook, clean, and generally do more around the house than he does, and he’d probably agree with this assessment, most of the time. I complain that I’m taking on the second shift before we even have kids. He says: Just don’t; let’s eat out and let the grout in the shower decay. To a certain extent, he’s right: Domestic peace can be found in learning not to care—or in outsourcing, if you can afford it.

But no matter how zen I try to be about household matters, kids loom as a project of an entirely different scale. As far as I can tell, benign neglect and money can’t address all the issues that they raise. You need elbow grease and time—and these were precisely the things I found it hard to extract from my husband when I wanted to, say, organize the closets.