On the Eighth Day of Christmas

Someone is 12-Days-of-Christmasing us.  And doing a great job of it, I must add.  Everything is packaged up very fancy and pretty.
The first day, December 13th, we received a basket full of red, green, and brown pears with a little stuffed felt bird ornament.  I took pictures.

The 2nd day is my favorite - for Two Turtle Doves we received a package of Cummings Chocolate turtles and two bars of Dove soap.

Three French Hens  - for some reason this keeps uploading vertically.   Three Tyson Frozen Cornish Game hens.

Four Calling Birds - three water warbling bird whistles and a chirping keychain bird

Five Gold Rings

Six Geese a Laying

Seven Swans a Swimming - that's a fancy swan ornament on top of six floating candles

Eight Maids a Milking  - this was on our porch this morning. That's 3 chocolate milks, 1 strawberry, 1 lofat, 1 eggnog, a whipping cream, and a buttermilk.

I started taking pictures on the 2nd day of Christmas because I was floored at how clever "my true love" is being.  I mean, Dove soap and Chocolate turtles?  Fabulous.
I strongly suspect I know who it is - but do I ever tell them I suspect?  Am I spoiling the fun of it all if I do?  Will they reveal themselves on the last day?  It's a dilemma. 

My birthday was wonderful, Hubby took the girls shopping and asked them what they liked to do best with me.  They both said they liked to play board games.  Which is somewhat predictable as it's one of the few things I can stay interested and stay awake to do with them.  So I received a game of Clue from Thing 1, and a new game I'd never heard of before called Sorry Sliders from Thing 2.  It is great that the girls are old enough to play games like this.  It's also a trick to find games they both like, but they both seem okay with these, so we've been playing a lot of them since my birthday.

Hubby brought me back some jewelry from Iceland.  It's fabulous, a black stone - volcanic stone, apparently, set in silver.  He gave me a necklace and earrings.  I don't have a picture, and the website won't let me copy down just the picture of the jewelry...  but here's a link -

http://www.aurum.is/en/store/show/23

It's really interesting and pretty - Hubby always picks out the most amazing jewelry.

On the dog front, Kelso has been using the edge of the cone of shame to scratch his neuter incision.  The tech at the vet's office was very impressed, he seemed quite surprised that the dog would have figured this out.  It caused some bleeding onto his fur, so they told me to duct tape a tube sock around the edge of the cone.  That lasted about ten minutes before he worked one corner up, then it just became a REALLY convenient chew toy that he carried around with him every where he went. And it looked absolutely ridiculous.  The vet's office told me to bring him in and they could do something to the cone.
They said the incisions all were healing nicely (no expensive antibiotics) but all they did to solve my problem  was give him a longer cone.  So now not only does he look like he lost an argument with a lamp, he lost an argument with an even bigger lamp.

I had to elevate his water bowl even higher - which is a pain because when he's done drinking and turns to walk away, the great big cone catches the bowl and he almost always dumps it over. And he can no longer even reach his toys when they're laying flat on the ground.  You have to hand everything to him, and then he chews on it for a moment, drops it, and whoops it's gone.  He just strains toward it, capturing it in the circle of the cone and for all I can tell, just stares at it.  Our little house, with narrow pathways between chairs and tables is a tight fit in the best of times, but with the cone on he catches on everything, and just digs in and pushes onward, either careening forward when the cone finally drags off the obstacle, or dragging the furniture with him.
The cone is scheduled to come off on Thursday, Christmas Eve.  I am so looking forward to it.  I think I need to schedule him his first Petsmart Puppy Grooming appointment that day - he's starting to be a little ripe.

This is the dog in the back yard with something he found he could reach to play with from the recycle bin.  He is flinging it around, then leaping after it.

He is growing so fast it's alarming.  He weighed 21 pounds on his first vet visit a few days after we got him, November 2nd or something like that.  When I took him in this last week for his new cone, he weighed in at 41 pounds.  He's not even five months old yet.

He wears the Cone of Shame

Kelso had a big day yesterday.  I did too, but in a long-term perspective, his was bigger.

After I dropped the girls off at school, I took him to the vet for his vaccinations, dew claw removal, and neutering.  It is sad to turn this happy tail wagging little guy over to the vet and walk away, knowing that a rare kind of horror awaits him...

I had a very busy day planned as my folks were driving down to celebrate my birthday, which is on Saturday.  I squoze in a morning of volunteering at the school in Thing 1's class until 11:30, then came home and started working on my Christmas cards.  My folks showed up around 12:30.  Their original plan was to take me to lunch, but my mother always has other things on her agenda - like buying buttons for a couple of sweaters she knitted, and buying fabric so she could make some Christmas Pajamas for my girls.  (she's a fabulous seamstress).
We figured that between then and 3:00 when it would be time to pick Thing 2 from school (Thing 1 has an after school class on Thursdays and gets out an hour later) there wasn't time to do all that and go to lunch too.

About then I mentioned that I hadn't renewed my drivers license, which was up this year.  My mother looked shocked and said you have to do it before your birthday.  I thought I had until the end of the month.  We looked on line, looked at the letter, and finally figured that though the information was somewhat unclear, better safe than sorry.  I'd hate to have to take the test or something just because I waited three extra days.
The big problem was I couldn't do it today, Friday, as all the offices are closed.

So we ate lunch from what I had in the fridge and then Mom and I drove over to get my license renewed.  Miraculously, that only took about twenty minutes.  We raced through our other errands, had my dad pick up Thing 2 from school, and got home in time for me to run over and get Thing 1.
I usually walk over with the dog.  She had forgotten about his big day, and when she remembered she broke into tears.  She cried off and on the rest of the evening and lamented about how much she loves him and how much she misses him... my folks took us to Chuck-a-rama for dinner (not my first choice, or probably my 2nd, but with the kids in tow it's so much the easiest place to eat) and Thing 1 spent the dinner hour lamenting and worrying and tearing up.
We ran to pick Kelso up after dinner.  Thing 1 was wringing her hands, drying her eyes...  They put us in a patient room and gave me the post-op instructions.  Then they brought him in.

Thing 1 and 2 took one look at him and just busted up laughing.  He was a little stunned from the medication and everything, whimpering a little... and there they are just barely able to stand from laughing so hard.  So much for sympathy.

Notice the "workout sweatbands" as my sister called them.  My sister says when her dog was neutered he only wore the cone a couple days.  Kelso gets his for two full weeks.  Mostly it's to keep him off the dew claws.
Today he's doing great, and was bouncing around this morning like there was no problem in the world.  The girls were discussing that it is a little embarrassing to walk him to school with him in the cone.
He is such a pretty dog, and he carries himself so nobly...  it is such a contrast to see him wearing this goofy cone head thing.
His walking buddy, the bull mastiff named Winston, goes in for the snip today.  He's only getting the neuter job, not the dew claws as well.  Chances are he'll be out of his cone in a couple of days, while our baby Kelso will be sporting this thing until Christmas Eve.  Just in time for the Christmas photos.  Phew!

Eee's a mean wabbit

The dog has ramped up his chewing.  He's started gnawing at things he's completely left alone for the last month and a half.
He's created some more serious casualties.  Today it was the girl's pencil box, that we have by the kitchen table for easy pencil access for homework.  Somehow he pulled it off the shelf, shredded half a dozen pencils, left bite marks on some others.  The girls were quite upset.   Yeah, well, it was a bunch of pencils.  No big deal.

The big deal was yesterday.  I was blissfully taking a nap when the shock, the horror was discovered.  It was Thing 2's FAVORITE Littlest Pet Shop creature.  Mind you, no matter which one would have been chewed, I'm pretty sure it would have been her favorite.

The picture can't do it justice - what used to be a benevolent fluffy creature is now scarred, damaged, and somehow evil in a way that I can't understand.  That once sweet gleam in his eye is now sinister.  The scratches on his face and the broken end off his ear are not a source of pity, they are horrifying and repugnant.  His turned up nose is now concealing bared teeth.   Oh, the humanity!
Could we buy another one?  I told her probably not, these things are seasonal and they make them for a while, then discontinue them.

Thing 2 marched into the kitchen and flung the zombie rabbit in the garbage, yelling her anger at the dog as she stormed past. 

A few minutes later her eyes lit up and she announced that she could ask Santa, who would just have his elves make a new one, and he could put it in her stocking.  She was content.

Santa found one on ebay for $5.95 including shipping, which is probably about what it cost originally.

Santa Claus is real, and he shops on ebay.

Report cards

Thing 2 brought her report card home first.  The ratings they give are not A through F, they're... I think it's 3, 2, and 1 for Outstanding, On Grade Level, and You Better Do Better!

Both of my kids do very well in school, mostly 2s on their report cards with an occasional 3 for reading.


For this last report card, her first for first grade, Thing 1 did just that, all 2s with one 3.  I was REALLY proud.  By comparison, Thing 1 in first grade got all 2s except the 2nd and 3rd trimester, the 3 in reading.  So Thing 2 is doing very well.


This first report card of 2nd grade for Thing 1 was ALL 3s except one 2 in Math.


I was floored!  Bless her little heart!


I am so proud of both of them!

Kelso doesn't do well with turkey

I neglected to mention in my Thanksgiving report, that on Friday as the dogs were in the garage, my sister's bigger boxer pushed the gate aside and got over to the work bench, where all the leftovers were lined up for cold storage.  He somehow nudged a 9x13 pyrex dish full of turkey leftovers off the bench, which of course crashed onto the floor.

When I walked out that evening to start shuttling food in for dinner, I couldn't even tell what had been in the dish, the glass had been licked clean.  Calls to mind the scene from A Christmas Story, don't it?  So we didn't have much turkey left over.

My sister was worried sick that Kelso had eaten some glass.  Her own two gluttons she figured deserved whatever the got, but if they led my little innocent boy into intestinal puncturing, she would never forgive herself.   But there was no way of knowing how much turkey or glass he'd eaten, if any.  Her bigger boxer is pretty dominant and might not have let Kelso near the turkey.

He came through just fine, so to speak.  Sunday afternoon when we got home from church we found that he doesn't digest turkey very well.  He had diarrhea on the tile floor (his first "accident" in weeks, but it's hard to count it as such), and there was a large piece of undigested turkey in the middle of it.  Was that more than you wanted to know?  Probably.  Sorry.