Snow Day!

Well, it finally snowed this morning! The girls were out playing and trying to build a snowman. It only snowed a couple of inches and it is melting quickly. Next week we will be in the mid 60's again so we may not see another good snow for another week. This will be good if the weather holds off a few more weeks becasue we want to put up Christmas lights and hate to do it so early. That is how it is done here. Find a good weekend and put 'em up no matter how early in the season it is. I can not believe that Thanksgiving is in less than 2 weeks.

Goodbye to Gilford

Well, after struggling with the most difficult decision we returned Gilford to his rescue. I took him to the vet and then to training. At both places the trainer and the vet expressed concerns about his "prey drive". Meaning he wants to hunt and attack animals that are smaller than him. The girls could not walk him because he was always after a bird or rabbit and he was too strong for them to control. We found out that he was rescued from Mississippi and there was a good chance that he was a trained hunting dog and not raised as a pet at all. We were told that we may never be able to have him and Gipple in the home safely together. As well as his reaction to other small dogs we meet on walks or at the pet store. We really struggled with this decision as we already had become extremely attached to him but inside I knew we were doing the right thing. The organization that we adopted him through has acres of land where they run, they are not housed in crates or cages and they are a no-kill shelter. These people really care for these animals and were very willing to accept him back. They now will try try place him in a home with out small animals.

Yesterday was a tough day for all of us, especially Keith. Gilford had attached himself most to him and Keith has a lot of guilt about this. So we shall see when and where our next dog comes from. We have learned a lot about dogs in the last 2 weeks, I think we will be a bit more informed the next time we decide to adopt a dog.

Blogging Once Again

I know, it has been way too long since I have updated my blog. I have been having computer issues and I like to add photos with my blogs and my photos have been inaccessible for months. Then, I got to far behind and did not know where to start. Well, I am starting today! I have updated our family photo site. I am not caught all the way up but I have August through yesterday complete. For labor day weekend we went camping up in the mountains near Wyoming. We call it Moose Country, because there is a moose release area nearby and we wanted to find some moose. We did end up seeing about 8 or 9 altogether. We went with our friends the Powers and had a fantastic time.

Madison is continuing to work hard on her vision therapy. We are hoping only a couple more months of this and after that she will begin her first round of orthodontics. This will be a spreader plate that will widen her palette and prepare her mouth for the braces she will need in a few years. The girls are both in AWANAS in the Sparks program and they love it. We are homeschooling again this year. We are studying animals and their worlds. We have a new zoo pass and are enjoying learning and then seeing first hand the animals we are studying.

We took a trip to California in September and spent some time with family and friends. The girls love to play with their grandparents dogs and Molly (one of the dogs) is the one Tori considers "hers". We were there for Molly's birthday which was a big milestone as she had serious cancer and Molly passed away about a week after we got home. We were very grateful to have been able to spend some time with her and we will miss her very much.

In October we drove to Knoxville to visit Keith's brother and his family. We had such an amazing time. We played wii for hours and hours and we have now caused another family to become wii addicts. The girls did makeovers, sleepovers, went to see High School Musical 3 and went Go-Kart racing with their fabulous cousins Brittany (18) and Chandler (15). We ate way too much. The girls were great in the car which makes it much easier for us.

We did go trick-or-treating this year, we went with most of the children in our subdivision. I think there were about 10 children all together. It was a strange evening,because it only got down to about 50 degrees. Usually, it is much colder and possibly snowing on Halloween. Madison was a girl pirate and Victoria was Sleeping Beauty. I convinced the girls to get costumes that we could layer under and it turns out we did not even need that this year. They came home with tons of candy and we traded them Target gift cards for all but 10 pieces of their candy, Keith then took the rest to work on Monday! Whew!!

This past weekend we went to Costco and on the way home we stopped at Petsmart, just to look and see if they had any rescued dogs for adoption. As it turns out they did and while our groceries thawed we picked out the newest member of the Blum family. His name is Gilford and he is 2 years old. He is a German Short hair Pointer, sweet and fairly mellow. We think he was neglected and he needs some socialization. We are not sure if he wants to eat our cat Gipple so he is living downstairs for now and the cat lives upstairs. We start our training with him on Friday. The girls are doing well with him, except they are a bit too bossy. Imagine that.

Keith left last night for a week long trip to Phoenix so I am doing all the walking and potty training for a while. It was 35 degrees when I took him out for his walk this morning. Yikes! OK. Back to school work. The rest of our pictures our on our Shutterfly site. The Blum family photos link is on the right side of my blog. I promise to update more often. Jane