Restarting

It's been such a long time since I've posted to this blog, and so much has happened. We had to say goodbye to Patches in the middle of the summer last year(one day after our anniversary to be exact). We also had previously added two guinea pigs to our little group. They were Humane Society adoptions: a long haired girl named Dakota, and another American shorthair named Speedy. Speedy passed earlier this year :(, so now we are down to 3 piggies aaaandd..... a puppy!

Yes, we dove in and adopted a puppy at the Humane Society on New Year's Eve last year. His name is Joey and he's a black Lab mix with some white patches on him. He's now almost a year old and we've been taking ng him through obedience classes to help us all learn together. He's much bigger than we initially intended our dog to be, but he's learning as he grows and has been such a wonderful influence for Aidan, who has gone from being afraid of all dogs to being confident around them.

The kids are growing and learning so much as they continue e school. Caleigh is now in grade 5, Aidan is in grade 3 and Brynna is an SK!  Both Caleigh and Aidan are in Cubs and Brynna has started Beavers.

I'm going to try to keep up with this blog better than I have in the cast, but make no promises that I won't forget from time to time.

We have more pets again

For a while, we were a single mammalian pet family. Now we have some new additions to our pet family to talk about: 2 female guinea pigs. They are definitely not related to each other directly, as one is an Abyssinian and the other is an American short-hair, but they definitely get along well together. Aidan decided he wanted to name the fuzzy one, wait for it, Fuzzy! Caleigh took a bit more time naming the other one, and at first didn't want her name selection revealed, but when I told her she had to let us say it since we're supposed to talk to the piggies to get them to be familiar with our voices and start trusting us, she let us know it was Splotch(for the splotches of colour all over her).

In a little over a week, they are "popcorning" for us, chirping and going nuts when they think we're coming to give them food or a fresh paper bag to play with. Fuzzy will come and touch my fingers with her nose when I put something in to the cage, while Splotch is a bit more reserved when it comes to that sort of display. I hesitate to say it, but I think that guinea pigs have more personality than rabbits(at least any that I have ever owned). Don't get me wrong, I loved the rabbits I had, and they were affectionate, but they just don't compare.

How could I have forgotten?

I seem to have forgotten to post that our hamster, Blondie, died about a month ago. We are not getting a replacement small animal during the summer. If we do decide to get a new pet, it will most likely be a guinea pig(maybe 2), and won't happen until the fall. I guess I need to remove Blondies' picture from the sidebar now. :(

June Already

This year has gone by so fast. I cannot believe that it is June already, and that in a little over a month, Brynna will be turning 3. I have been so busy trying to get a bunch of stuff done before the end of June: shawl for my brother's fiance, shawlette for Mrs Dean(it's her last year as principal of St Daniel), planning a wedding gift for Bill and Jenn, and practising my spinning as much as possible(I've been silly enough to commit to participating in the Tour de Fleece on Ravelry, and on 3 teams no less!).

My father's cancer is responding well to treatment: it has shrunk, and there has been no progression in the bone, so now we watch and wait.

Our sole remaining cat has advanced heart disease and needs to be on blood pressure medication to try to relieve some retinal hemmorrhaging. He needs to be rechecked to see if it's working for him, and we have to face the fact that there is nothing we can do for him, and that some time in the future his heart will stop working. We're not going to subject him to an ultrasound or an ecg to find out what kind of heart muscle problem he has or how bad it is, as the amount of information we would get from the testing isn't worth the cost or the stress to him.

More being busy

Kevin has been away this week to Florida to install equipment in the Everglades for year-round data availability. It's been such a fun week already. We've had a death in the aquarium(the golden mystery snail), and now Aidan has some sort of infection going in his throat. It could be strep, as he's saying it feels like he's swallowing sharp, pointy things. Doctor took a swab this morning and will have the results tomorrow for us.

Tomorrow night can't come soon enough for me.

More pets and an appointment

Thankfully, these 2(possibly 3) new editions are pretty low-maintenance. We now have some mystery snails in the fish tank along with our lone goldfish. I say possibly 3 because we got 2 full-size snails plus a teeny-tiny one that I haven't seen in the tank for just over a week now. Just trying to keep an eye on the gold snail, as he/she is very sluggish, way more sluggish than the black/brown one. Apparently this is normal, though, so I'm not too worried, so long as the snail keeps moving periodically.

Brynna has an appointment for her speech evaluation next week, and we're going through the questionnaire Kevin was given at the info session a few weeks ago. It's a huge questionnaire, and we're going through it with Brynna, but it doesn't take long for her to get bored and want to go do something else. Hopefully if she needs some help, we'll get it figured out in plenty of time for her to get things sorted out before she starts school in 2013.

Busy, busy, busy

That's what life is like with 3 kids. Caleigh just turned 8 last weekend, and is now preparing for her First Communion. Brynna is just exploding with words, sentences, and imaginative play. Just the other week, she pretended to talk to Kevin on her toy cell phone to tell him that she found his sweater on her rocking horse and that I had to put it away for him. She may not know the words sister and brother, but she does refer to Caleigh and Aidan as "her Caleigh, yeah" and "her Aidan, yeah", lol.

The kids are doing well in school, except for some difficulty controlling/channelling emotional outbursts properly. I'm not sure how to help them figure this out, as I have trouble with the same issue myself.

Last fall, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and has, so far, received radiation and just started the 5th round of 6 chemo sessions. He's responding well as far as I know to the treatment. I hope that this continues.

I've recently joined the local weavers and spinners guild to try to get some time for myself to be out and around other adults. I'm hoping that I will also get a chance to learn how to properly use my spinning wheel and get at all of the fibre I have around the house.