Shiloh has great-grandbabies again!  (Too bad she isn’t here to meet them!)  My parents’ golden retriever, Bluebonnet, had puppies on Sunday.  She had 11, but we lost one the first night.  We have 10 healthy beautiful puppies (6 male, 4 female).  Those of you who know my family know how much we love our golden retrievers, and how much we love puppies.  However, my mom is a little sick of taking care of puppies. 

This time around Randy and I agreed to let the puppies and Bluebonnet come live at our new house once they are about 2 weeks old.  Sweet Logan has never really recovered from losing his mom and best friend 15 months ago (neither have I).  We are hoping all the activity will get him in a happier mood…plus we are going to keep a little girl pup!  We have wanted to get another puppy, but we were really hoping to find a non-related female to breed Logan with.  He is almost 9 now and we still haven’t found our female so we are going to get one out of this litter. 

In other puppy news, Logan is a dad again!  Our good friends have a female chocolate lab and we bred Scout with Logan.  Those pups were born on March 29th and are also adorable (we are planning to go visit those pups soon and I will post some pictures). 

Here are a few pictures of the pups and of course Reed.

Life has been even more hectic than usual the last 2 months.  We decided to put our house on the market in January because we had outgrown the square footage.   I know that selling and buying a home is one of the single most stressful events in every person’s life and now I can understand why.

Randy and I have literally spent thousands of man hours fixing up our sweet house.  When we bought it it needed some TLC and we gave it.  We also spent LOTS of money fixing it up inside and out.  It took us a few weeks to get it on the market because we had so much stuff everywhere that we needed to rent a storage unit so potential buyers wouldn’t realize just how little storage was in our house.

We got the house listed at the end of January and from day 1 through the end of March we had 76 showings.  Yes, that’s right.  76!!!!!!!  Let me translate that for you, that means we were not able to spend one weekend day or night at our house for over 2 months.  It also means that every single time we left the house for any period of time it had to be in tip top shape with no clutter left out, no dishes in the sink and no Reed messes.  Let me tell you, it was just too much.  Almost every Sunday while we were in church Randy would get at least one call that someone wanted to come look at the house.  SUCH a pain!!

Long story short, almost all the feedback we received was that the buyers  LOVED the house, loved the location, loved how we had decorated it and the upgrades we had put in, but they didn’t like the commercial building behind us.  Obviously we can’t change that.  Our realtor Kyle says that in his opinion if that building wasn’t behind our house we probably would have sold it the first week it was on the market.  The most perplexing thing to us is that the building NEVER bothered us.  In fact it was kind of a bonus.  No neighbors behind us, (there were no windows in the building facing our house), rear gate entry in case you forgot something at the houe and needed to run back in, and regular maintenance and upkeep.

Luckily, two days before we closed on the new house someone made us a real offer that we accepted.  We had received 4 ridiculous low ball offers prior to this one and refused all of them.  These people wanted to pay us the price we paid for the house 4 years ago!  Are they kidding?  We have easily dumped $10-12,000 into the house and they want us to take a loss???  People watch too much HGTV and think they can do whatever they want in the current housing market.  They are wrong.  I tried not to take it personally, but how could I not?  That house has literally got our heart and sole in it and these people just wanted a good deal.  I think not.  Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to get my thoughts and feelings down on paper 🙂

In the end, we are under contract and should close on April 26!!  Praise the Lord all of this is almost over 🙂

J

We spent last weekend in Dallas with my second family and all of my friends from A&M.  Amanda got married and was truly the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.  I’m not exaggerating here.  Amanda is photogenic and has a wonderful smile, but she is like me and doesn’t dress up very often.  I was TOTALLY blown away!

It was a family affair for all of us as my parents and Diana came too.  We shared a room with the Pikes (I always seem to share a room with you guys!!) and mom and dad kept Reed.  We all had a great time at the reception and sweet Reed was a trooper.  I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until he started to nod off on my shoulder.  I looked and it was 11pm!!!  No wonder the poor baby was tired.  He fell asleep on the floor in a pile of our coats…please don’t call CPS, I promise he was safe and perfectly happy!

Congratulations John & Amanda!!!

You would not believe how much has changed/occurred in our lives in the last 3 weeks.  All of these things feel like they are worthy of individual posts, but I just don’t have the energy to do it.

I spent my first week away from Reed.  I was working in Katy for an audit and couldn’t figure out how to have childcare during the day, so Reed stayed at home with Randy.  I’m still nursing him so I had to pump extra bottles for weeks in advance.  The part I didn’t account for was the fact that I would have to keep pumping (and storing) while I was in Houston.  What a pain!  All in all Reed was fine and I was fine.  Randy is so involved already that he had no problems at all.  Reed was in very capable hands.

I sold the XTerra.  I bought that car right after graduating college and it was the first car I had bought for myself, and the first new car I had ever owned.  It was SO good to me.  I owned it from June 2002 to September 2009 and put 2 sets of tires, 1 new battery, and a set of brake pads on it.  That’s it.  It was a sad day when it left our driveway.

I got a new job.  I’m still working at Tesoro, but I’m finally out of audit.  Some people love audit and want to do it forever, but I am not one of them.  It’s a great starting place and you get to learn tons about the company as well as meet lots of people, but I never felt like I was contributing to the operation of the company.  I really needed that part.  The way I got my new job is the best part.  There had been an analyst job posted on our intranet, but I didn’t apply for it.  A mommy friend of mine really pushed me to meet with Louie (the Director) and see if I would be interested.  I tried to meet with him the Friday I was to return from Houston, but we didn’t finish on time and I wasn’t back.  I met with Louie on Tuesday Sept. 8.  He urged me to apply and said they had already selected a candidate but that if I was interested in applying he would re-open the position.  He did, and I did the same day.  I interviewed on Thursday and was offered the job on Friday.  Needless to say I accepted.  I started the new job right before we went to Vermont for vacation and can’t wait to really get started!!

I will make a separate post about Vermont and the new things Reed is doing.

We’ve started this new year on quite a sad note. Friday we had to put Shiloh down after an aggressive form of cancer spread through her body and began to slow her down. The vet had diagnosed her with Lymphoma back in November and said she might not make it till Christmas. As you can guess, the news was very hard to take, and the reality was setting in that her long and charmed life was coming to an end. After the initial shock and the sorrow had subsided, we realized we had to make the most of the time we had left with her and actually LIVE with her.

She was showing no signs of pain so we did the same routine things we always did with her, like walks in the neighborhood, but we scaled them down so to not tire her out. Julie began giving her table scraps in the kitchen and even cooking small meals for her when the hard dog food was too hard to chew. She was getting the Queen’s treatment for sure!

Throughout the holidays we kept close eyes on her, but she was still the same Shiloh we had always known. With the exception of feeding her differently and not pushing her exercise, nothing was different. We kept hoping to see signs of pain or anything abnormal to know when the time was getting closer.

It wasn’t until just after Christmas that we noticed an irritation when she would paw at her left eye that had swollen a bit. We noticed it earlier this week and had to wait through the New Year’s holiday hours to get in to see the vet. Our gut feeling was that this trip to the vet would be the last, but we stayed optimistic in case the swelling was simply an irritation or allergy.

Luckily, Friday was a day off for Julie in her 9-80 work schedule, and she had the time off already to tend to Shiloh. I went to work and had an errand to run during lunch, and on my way back she called me with tears streaming that it was the worst scenario — the cancer had spread to her eyes and was now affecting her vision. The vet had confirmed what we already knew… it was time.

Shiloh is buried at my parents place, where we have a number of family dogs that we layed to rest. She was a special dog in Julie’s life and I believe it comforted her to know that Shiloh’s body would be taken care of and given a little more special treatment than any dog she has ever had. She was one of a kind and she touched so many people with her precious smile and an innocent nudge with her nose whenever she saw an open hand.

Goodbye, Sweet Girl.

-RB

This is an Olympic year and Bejing, China is the host. A flurry of controversy has surrounded these games, even before they started. Political views on China’s associations with Tibet and Darfur, censorship and limitations of the jounalists from all countries covering the stories throughout the Olympics, ages of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team are some of the hot topic so far.

However there is one story that has transcended nations and boundaries to become the legacy-in-the-making for these Olympic Games: His name is Michael Phelps, and he’s a member of the USA Men’s Swim Team.

Tonight, Phelps broke an Olympic record and earned his EIGHTH Gold medal!! This record will certainly live on in the record books for the remainder of our lifetime. It is so astronomical and unlikely that I don’t see how it will ever be repeated.

Congrats, Michael!!

The entire Texas coast was hit in some form or fashion by remnants of Hurricane Dolly. The eye of the storm made landfall yesterday near South Padre Island, but the bands of storms on the upper swing went as far north as Houston. From the coast the rain is spiraling around South Texas. San Antonio is finally getting its share of the rain today after yesterday’s disappointing drizzle.

An interesting twist to the story is that our neighbors are vacationing in Port Aransas, Texas this week. They have teamed up with another family and rented a house on the coast for the entire week. Our neighbors are verterans to this kind of vacation, but their friends are the rookies… what a story this will make!! I spoke to them yesterday evening (after the brunt of the storm hit) and they are all fine. The winds were upwards of 60mph with frequent power outages, but they stayed inside and played a lot of cards.

I had to speak with him last night, because while they are on the coast getting pounded by Dolly, their dogs are at home getting attacked by skunks!! I went over yesterday to feed and check on them, and WHOA, that scent was all TOO FAMILIAR! We’ve had many adventures involving dogs and skunks, just ask those that were at our house for bible study one night when our own dogs were hit by a potent furry creature… we rushed the closing prayer and everyone ran for their cars!

Our neighbors should still have remnants of the wonderful scent when they come home tomorrow. They are Texan imports and have never had to deal with the stinky varmits before… nor have they vacationed in a hurricane. What a week!

-RB