Well, we’ve had a busy week around here this week. Kevin has been working l-o-n-g days, often times leaving at 6:30 or 7 in the emorning and getting home after 7 or 8 at night.  We’ve been up a lot at night here and there as we’ve been letting Brutus sleep on the floor in our room, not in his crate. He does awesome, but if one of us hears him up walking around we’ll take him out. So that’s occasionally been around 2 am.  For the last couple of weeks Griffin has been waking up at 4 am and coming into our room to “snuggle”. He’s wide awake but after he lays with me for a minute I take him to his room, rock him, and he goes right back to sleep in his bed in a couple of minutes.  We aren’t really sure why he’s waking – he’s not scared of anything and he can go right back to sleep.  But I feel like I’ve been up multiple nights in a row at 12 am (to potty of course), 2, 4, 6, and finally getting up around 7 am.  Sheesh!

I took Lily back in for x-rays on Thursday. I feel so bad for her, ever since last weeks appointment she’s been limping even more than normal, likely because they irritated something during the exam. She was pretty uncomfortable without the anestheic (as they lay her on her back for the x-rays and extend the legs – who would like that?). So they ended up having to use the anesthetic to get the images. She was pretty groggy when I picked her up but definitely happy to see me.  She has pretty significant arthritis in both hips, the left is much worse. And her right knee seems to be developing arthritis too and also has irritation and signs of effusion. The vet believes she may have a partial ACL tear in her knee so I’m going to take her to OSU to an ortho to get it looked at.  Can’t have our young girl hobbling along! I only wish I’d done this sooner. I had written off any injury to just over exertion – wish I would have taken her in a long time ago.  She is now on anti-inflammatory pills twice a day which she takes with no trouble. They told us that would definitely help and she seems better. Hard to tell if that is because she’s gotten over the irritation caused by the exam or from the pills. We are also looking into changing her food in the near future too. We wanted to get Brutus and Lily on the same brand at least and after some research that Kevin did on dog foods we’ve decided to go with Merrick for now. Brutus was in need of more food so we have just switched him to Merrick Puppy formula too.  Lily’s we plan to change over when we reach the end of her current supply. Here are Lily’s x-rays, more for our reference than for anything else!

On Friday we had a surprise birthday party for one of our friends on our agenda.  After asking various sitters I was able to find one, thankfully, only to find out the morning of that she became ill and wasn’t able to do it!  Ugh!  We have three that we use and she was the only one with any availability – so I called in a huge favor from Amy and Andy! Thankfully they watched Finn for us. He had a great time playing with his cousins and on the tablet after they went to bed. We took ice cream over as a thank you and I received a few messages throughout the night with showing they were enjoying their sundae’s! Graham was off at the Pine Wood Derby for Cub scouts!
Lately I have been feeling like getting some house projects done as when I look at the calendar after the next couple of weeks we will be gone for two weekends and when we return we’re busy with Finn’s party and then it is already the middle of March! Part of me is quite nervous to start Chestnut’s nursery but I’m doing my best to think good thoughts and move forward. We will soon be moving all kinds of beds around starting with getting Griffin a full-size bed for his room. His crib frame converts into a full size bed – so that is step one. Then the current queen bed in his room will go to our now one and only smaller guest room. And the full that is in that bed we will be giving away along with the king bed that is in Chestnut’s room currently. Lots of musical beds it seems! So this weekend we decided to do our painting project in Chestnut’s room. We already have all the supplies as we decided to go with plain white (bye bye almond), which we have leftover from our basement project. I cleaned the walls, patched the holes, and we were off! I must say it was a late night by the time I got two coats of trim work done throughout the room. Brutus was with me for part of it – literally napping on my leg!  Kevin rolled the room on Sunday and Finn helped each of us with some brush work and rolling. He is so excited to be able to help and keeps talking about how he can tell Chestnut that he helped paint his room! Oh, and Kevin insisted I wear a respirator – which is a great idea – though I did got in my way at times I couldn’t smell a thing!  First project, complete!  I have found some cool ideas on Pinterest for converting the closet into a closet/changing table so Kevin plans to do that sometime before May! Finn went on an excursion to Franklin Park Conservatory this week and had a blast running around and seeing all of the greenery and flowers! He’s also been working a lot on his letters and sounds – often sounding out a word when you talk to him. He is able to tell you what letter the word starts with. He’s always said Lily like “Yily” but now he is saying “la, la, la, Lily” and “la la la Liquid” for L words :).