Thankful Thursday

(Picture from seeing my sister last Thursday, in Columbia for a birthday lunch.)

I'm thankful that I had a really great birthday last week. A whole day with my husband. We went to the zoo in Columbia, just to do something different. The Ft. Worth zoo is much better, and the Thailand animal parks were definitely way more fun. But it was just nice to be together.

I'm thankful that so many friends reach out via Facebook, text, cards, or calls just to wish me a Happy Birthday. It made it so much more wonderful to be remembered.

Though I know I will occasionally miss Fiona, I'm thankful that she does not live here anymore.

I'm thankful for some papering this week: got my nails done yesterday and had a massage today. Man, these types of pampering do WONDERS for a girl who has been really uptight and emotional lately.

I'm thankful for people responding to my posts here. Really, thankful. (Especially the last one about Fiona... it was pretty raw and emotional, so it meant a lot that people took the time to respond.)

I'm thankful for having a lot of things to look forward to over the next couple of month...

Sad Day. Farewell Fiona.

Well, Fiona is no longer part of our family (well, at least she won't be part of our future). I'm so sad as I write this, but I'm also feeling quite a bit relieved. And I'll probably feel a lot more relieved once the sadness wears off.For weeks now, we have been trying to find another--better--home for Fiona. Little girl just had way too much energy for this little condo, and she was pretty defiant and getting to be very dominant. Though sometimes she could be the sweetest, cuddliest dog, there were also times when she would be a little devil.A couple of months ago, this guy came to our door and seemed to get along with her really well. He asked if he could take her home... It's a long story, really, but at that point, she had only been with us a few weeks, and we were still hoping that we could turn her around. 10 days later, I called him to say that he could have her. But I never heard back. But, the moment that I started envisioning Fiona living on his farm, with another puppy, with lots of land to run in, it seemed to plant a seed. I realized that she really would be better off with a different type of family. She's not content to be a couch potato like Nala. She needs more attention than we're able to give her, and she needs more time put into her discipline than we have.

Matt jokes that she 'misrepresented herself' when we adopted her. Ironically, the reasons that we chose her were because she was calm & submissive and that she didn't bark. Boy, were we fooled!!! She ended up being a crazy monster who in fact, hardly ever stopped barking. That's not a good fit for a small condo. Especially a condo that also houses a rather large, injured dog.
Our neighbors tried to fine us for her barking (as if we could stop her if we tried!). Eventually, we got a muzzle and had to keep her muzzled a majority of the time. Still, she found a way to make an enormous amount of noise in the form of a high-pitched yelp. Ugh. So frustrating.

Then, there was the house-training. She was potty trained, for the most part, when we got her. However, she seemed to always want to make a statement in the form of some type of deposit on our floors--or on our bed. I can't even count the amount of times she peed on our bed. Mostly right after she had been fussed at. Then, there was the one time she peed on Matt's face. And the fact that she was sick for weeks, and every night, we'd come home to diarrhea/poop in her crate and have to spend a couple hours cleaning up after her. A couple hours that we really didn't have to spare. I haven't even been able to do the 'normal' laundry entirely pretty much since we got her... because we were constantly cleaning up after her messes. Washing sheets from our bed, washing blankets, washing the comforter, and also washing all the blankets and sheets from her bed. (Man, I look forward to doing normal laundry!!)All that being said, I am sad to see her go. I have struggled so much with giving her away because I don't want her to feel 'rejected' or 'not good enough' or 'unloved'. I don't want her to think that we don't love her because she was bad. I also don't want people to judge me for being a failure as a dog-owner or for being irresponsible or selfish. Man, that's some vulnerability right there, but as I verbalized all of this to my sister on the way home from work, I was balling my eyes out as all of those things cut really deep. I think I struggle so much with 'rejecting' Fiona because I can picture myself in her shoes.
I need to remember that she's a dog. She can't rationally think through any of these things. She can't logically understand the reasons we couldn't keep her or even the reasons that we struggled with giving her away. She's not a person.

Which leads me to one of my other fears: someone joked with us a couple weeks ago that when we have children, we won't be able to give them back like we can return or re-home a dog. Though I'm sure the person (and I can't even remember who it was) didn't realize it, they were actually verbalizing the very thoughts I've been afraid people would have. I don't want people to think that Matt and I are too irresponsible for children. We learned a lot of things about parenting through Fiona: about sacrificing time, about the way we work together, about discipline, and about frustrations. In the end, we sort of admitted defeat but also realized we were probably being selfish in trying to prove that we could do it. In fact, at this time, in this season, we can't handle her. Though parenting a child has it's similarities, it's also different on way more levels.

Probably more later, but this is all I can process right now...

Fiona Adventures: Bit by a Snake

Happy Labor Day! So very thankful for a day off today, I took little Miss Fiona to the dog park. It's something we've been doing lately (and going on long walks) to try to wear her out so we can enjoy her a little more at home.
Well, today, we were having a lovely time at the dog park. Chattin' it up with the other dog owners and watching her run herself ragged. (It's 3 hours later, and she's been asleep since we got home. This is good.) At one point, I glance behind the bench where I was sitting to check on her, and I see her playing with a little white terrier kinda dog. They looked fine, as they were playing with some kind of stick. Then, I looked again as I realized it might not have been a stick after all...Well, it wasn't a stick. In fact, it was a snake that didn't seem to take kindly to being batted back and forth between a small terrier kinda dog and a Fiona puppy. It was striking at one, then the other. And I saw it 'catch' on Fiona's neck. Twice. All this while I said rather calmly to the guy sitting on a nearby bench, "Oh, they're playing with a snake." We got up, and he threw Fiona towards me since she wouldn't come when I called her. She was having too much fun 'playing' with this new toy. And we got the smaller dog away too. By then, all the other dogs came over to see the new fun toy, and the other owners were all trying to keep their four-legged children away from this snake.

We got all the dogs away, and two of the guys worked together to pin it's head to the ground with a stick. One guy grabbed it near its head and carried it far away. During the pinning and carrying, they determined it was a rat snake. A constrictor, so not poisonous.

Fiona quickly forgot about that toy and moved on to racing around with the bigger dogs again. She seemed unfazed, so I wasn't worried about her. And even though the guys seemed pretty confident, I wanted to be sure. So I googled rat snakes on my Droid to make sure I didn't need to take her to visit her daddy at the vet. Google confirmed the picture of the type of snake we had encountered and that rat snakes are constrictors, so Fiona Jayne had nothing to be concerned about. The little terrier dog that she was playing with had cause for concern though. Even though the snake was only like 3.5 feet long, it might have been able to take down the little white dog had it been left to its own devices and not had Super Fiona to bat it around with him. :)
We stayed at the dog park for another 45 minutes or so and had a friend from small group join us. And she's fine. Even snake bites don't faze our littlest girl. She's resilient.

Fiona Adventures

To be honest, I thought that Fiona was a small dog. I didn't really comprehend that she was a puppy. I probably would not have been so excited about getting her. Our first couple weeks were pretty rough with all the whining, yelping, barking, and house training. I thought I was going to go insane! Thankfully, she's doing much better now, but here are some of the adventures we tackled:
1. She seems to have come to us with giardia, which is a not-so-fun infection of her intestines. She's had some lovely explosive diarrhea that sometimes greets us in (and out of) her kennel when we come home. Thus, the pictures of her first bath. (Much better than a picture of the mess, I assure you.) Thankfully, Matt works at a great vet and gets good discounts on treatment for her. 2. I think on day #2 or 3, we had a dog bed laying beside her kennel because we thought Nala may want to lay close to her while we were gone. This site greeted us when we got home. Somehow, puppy managed to get the dog bed partially inside the crate, enough for her to tear out the insides and completely ruin the entire (XL-sized) dog bed. The next day, Matt came home from work and found that she had somehow pushed the bottom liner of the crate out and eaten a large portion of the carpet under her crate. (Goodbye, security deposit.)

3. As a result of the above incident, we decided to try keeping both the dogs out together but limited to one hallway. We bought this nice gate from Petsmart. There was nothing shredable. 4. We came home to this: Oh, Fiona...

She proves to me all the time that Nala really is the perfect dog. ;)

Welcome, Fiona Jayne Flagler!

Fiona Jayne became part of our family on July 7th, 2010, our 3rd anniversary!

We found her at the Berkeley County ASPCA on July 5th, but it took a couple of days to get everything worked out with our landlord. We loved her right away! When we walked back into the room of dogs, we saw a dog that looked a lot like Nala. He started barking right away, which caused almost all of the dogs to start barking! Fiona was one of the 2 dogs who did not bark, so we were attracted to her. We took her back into the room to get to know her and wanted to take her home right away, but we had to come back the next day for Nala to meet her to make sure they would get along. They got along just fine. :) And we still loved her (at that time, her name was Maggie), so we pursued the application to get her. We've had many adventures this last month but are very glad that she has become part of our family. Nala seems to love being an older sister, even though she can sometimes seem very annoyed with her 'little sis'. More updates of Fiona's adventures to come...

Life Since California

Two things will be wrong with this post.
1) There will be no pictures. I dislike posting blogs with no pictures, but it's not an option at this point.
2) It's not in chronological order with other posts I'm working on. SOOO much to update on (including 12 days of vacation).

Now, on to the post!

We got back from California at 3:30 am on June 29th. I had the day off, but Matt had to work. I did laundry and ran errands. Had lunch with Grandma, Steven and Steph. Picked up Nala. That night, we had jetlag and didn't go to sleep til like 5am.

The next day, lots happened:
1. We had our CARES interview (remember this post?).
2. I found out I got a promotion that I had applied for at Verizon.
3. Also found out that said promotion comes with a nice raise. (Praise God it was more than I expected!)

Somewhere in those couple of days, Nala had a checkup for her leg. The vet discovered that now it's both of her back knees that are ruptured. He recommended the specialist do the surgery, which took the price of the surgery from $100 to $4500. Yikes. I cried. At the vet (Matt's work). I was embarrassed. The vet also told us that after 3 years, there was little to no difference in healing for dogs who have the surgery and ones who do 'conservative therapy' which means REST. We opted for the rest.

We found out we got accepted to CARES. Now we are just waiting for the right apartment community to open up for us. Please be praying with us for this. :)

We got a refund that we didn't expect from Matt's first semester at school. We made grown-up decisions with it. Paid off a couple credit cards completely. Put more money towards another card. Put away some money for emergencies. Put away some money for moving. And bought new computers (thus the no pictures on this post). We can justify all of these things for you if you need it. :)

We also got another dog. (What a teaser!!!) You'll have to wait for another post to meet her, in case you're on Facebook because there are pictures there already. :)

That's all for now... :)