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.