Q1 2013 Update

Well, what's new since last time?  So much, but also so very little.

We have now been in our house 3 years, and it is still everything we could ask for!  There have been no major damages or upsets, and we are very very thankful that our whole main floor is all hardwood as we've been raising a puppy!

On the puppy front, she is now 14 months old and just as lovable as when we first got her.  She is over 17 lbs now and very long and lean.  Unfortunately she does shed a little and does not appear to actually be a maltipoo as originally thought, but that's ok by us!  We bought a DNA test for her to see what she actually is and what health risks she might encounter later in life, but we have yet to use it - she is not supposed to have had anything in her mouth for several hours when you do the swab, and well, that's a small challenge for her!

She is still as friendly and easy-going as can be, and I can't imagine what it would be like not having her in our lives.  She packs so much personality and love and goofiness in her tiny little fluffy body and she makes us laugh every single day.  She has settled very well into her routine - we have a dog walker on weekdays, and she does get to go to doggie daycamp once a week to keep her well-socialized and active.  She loves being outside in any weather except rain (including snow, no matter how deep!), and she lives for her daily walks.  We don't crate her anymore which has been nice for all of us, I'm sure.  She is not overly mischievous and sticks to destroying just her toys and not ours.  She is however obsessed with eating each and every stick in our yard, which results in her getting up and barfing them all up in the middle of the night every couple weeks but what can you do :)

When we first got her, it took us a very long time to get her settled on a good food and portion size and that was hard to take.  Every week or so she would get sick and we'd have to put her on prescription wet food until it passed, and it took us a lot of experimentation to get her through that, but now she's an eating machine!!  Her favorite snacks are peanut butter and carrots, but she loves bacon, cheese, ice cubes, cottage cheese, hot dogs, watermelon, anything really!  Because she always has such a hearty appetite for everything, it was very scary last fall when she got sick and completely lost her appetite.  She wouldn't eat or drink or move hardly at all, and several vet trips did not help diagnose or fix her.  It finally passed about a week later, but it was very very scary and hard to see her in so much discomfort and dropping pounds and not being able to help her or let her know we were trying to help her.  Hopefully she never gets that sick again!

As for the humans in our family, I am still at L-3 and am happy to be employed and paid.  I've had my Mini Cooper for about a year now, and still love driving it.  There are some design flaws in the interior that really drive me crazy sometimes, but it's just such a fun vehicle I don't really mind.

Anthony is a manager at Nuance still, and is really rocking it.  He travels once every couple months, but never for too long so it's not overwhelming.  He had been driving his high school graduation present, a 1999 Jetta, but it finally got to be in bad enough shape it needed replacing.  He was excited to get a hybrid, and settled on a habanero (read: bright neon orange) Prius C so he's had fun getting used to that the past week or so.  Though our commute is only about 15 minutes most days, the great mileage will really be nice when we take road trips down south to see his family.

I think that's about enough updating for now, but if you are a regular reader to my random ramblings, I will be updating more frequently now!