Welcome to the family Lola!

Sorry it's been a few days since I've meant to post this, but well, it's been a little crazy and I've been a little tired. After a very boring and long day of waiting on Friday, and after many changes of plans, we headed out to get our Lola at about 7:30 Friday night. She lived about an hour away, so we never meant to leave that late, but it turned out that was our only option if we wanted her before Sunday. And we did.


Upon picking her up, we were told she has really mellowed out (I am convinced she channeled us and started figuring out how to be our pet). This is all despite this story.

Which after living with her for a day or two doesn't surprise me a bit. Here is her favorite toy after being with her for about a day:

She has taken to her crate beautifully. The first night she was a total dream. Rob and I each woke up once in the middle of the night to take her out for a potty break and she complied perfectly. Last night wasn't quite the utopia of the first night, but not so bad. She would whine for about 15 minutes after we would leave (loud enough to wake me and Scout up sleeping on another level of the house). We laid there around 4 o'clock listening to her and likening it to letting your baby have cry outs when you take away Binkys and bottles, except we each agreed it was much easier to listen to a puppy instead of your child. Sorry Lola. I say "we" when I talk about leaving her alone, but Rob was the lone solider last night. He did all the Lola duty last night trying to help me sleep (but there is no helping a pregnant women in her last few weeks), but I did appreciate not having to take her outside, etc. Scout got me up anyways to lay with her for awhile in the middle of the night because she was afraid of aliens in her room. This is all just prepping me for Elinor I suppose. Ah well.
Anyway, Lola is proving to be such a little bundle of joy. We love her so much and she is such a good dog and a total sweetheart. It's a good thing for Scout too I think, having something in the house that shares in the attention before sis gets here. On the way home from picking up Lola, I was telling Scout how she and Lola were going to be best friends and she got all silent (Which I didn't really notice), but we finally noticed she was hanging her head a little. We prodded her a bit and she finally broke down and sobbed, "I guess you won't need me anymore!" It was the very saddest thing ever. She was absolutely heartbroken. Yikes. I finally got out of her that she misunderstood me that I was saying that now, Lola and I were going to be best friends. We set her right, but we were all a little shaken, mostly Rob and I about life after Elinor, and all that will ensue. She is doing great, and we actually ended up taking home two dogs. Since Lola came home, Scout has been either Lola's mom or her sister.

Here are our two dogs sleeping in their crates:

I have interacted with Scout dog more then Scout the human since Friday night (not that I am not used to such a thing, it is just a little more intense). Luckily, she is willing to pretend the potty is grass......... But she does drink a lot of water out of a bowl on the floor.

Anyway, it's been great so far and we are all getting very attached to her and just love her to death. Cat and Travis and Booker just left, they were in town and came to visit Lola tonight. She was a little more bashful then usual, but played a little with them. Everyone needs to come see her soon, while she still is little, she is going to grow massively so fast! Everyone remarks about how huge she looks for being 8 weeks old. It's true.Her paws kill me the most, I love them, they are massive.

Rob loves his little Lola

A Crib Tale

We had an interesting thing happen last week I thought worthy of sharing. My family was out and about killing time in Orem/Provo, so we decided to hang out at Rob's dad's house so Rob could take a nap and I could search the basement for the last remaining baby things we have stored over there. I located and re boxed all the things we are going to need soon and went back upstairs. Rob had woken up and happen to mention the crib (which was dismantled and in the car port). I went out there to check it out and to make sure all the parts were there and ready for Ells. What I didn't find was all the hardware. We have had to dismantle and move the crib 3 times since Scout was born and I always scooped up all the hardware after Rob took it apart and put it in a baggie, and taped it to some part of the crib. Somehow this step got skipped the last time and I was quite upset. I gave ourselves a lecture on how we need to be more responsible with our stuff (I was thinking about how I had been through every baby stuff box we have and hadn't seen all the bolts, etc.) Anyway, Rob kept swearing he'd seen it somewhere, but I was having none of that, and in all my nesting glory, went down to the computer because I must have this little problem resolved NOW. Well first I went back out to the crib and secured the model number and brand, then googled hardware for it to see about replacing it. What popped up was all this info about how our crib had gotten recalled last summer! Apparently, the wood slats are prone to breaking and 42 children have met injury since it's release (no deaths at present, thank goodness). I find out that you need to take the model stickers off the crib, some crib bumper things, and the hardware, send it to Jardine, and they will send you a voucher for any crib you want at Babies R Us for the highest price your crib was ever sold for.

I went upstairs to share this interesting tidbit of news with Rob, with the nag of the thought that one thing they needed was the stupid hardware. He was surprised by the news and funny enough, was digging through a junk drawer of Dale's and found the hardware right then.

Well, we peeled off the stickers, unscrewed the bumpers they told us to, added the hardware, printed our FedEx labels they sent us, signed a little statement stating that we would never try to use that crib or sell it to anyone ever, and shipped it all off to Jardine. Today I got my voucher, and nows, I gets to go crib shopping for a brand new crib.

I'd now like to point out all the serendipitous things that occurred in my story:

1.) Of greatest importance, Scout didn't meet any sort of demise in her almost two years of sleeping and mistreating the crib.

2.) If I had taped the hardware to the crib like I always did, we would have put it back together none the wiser, and Elinor would be sleeping in that death trap in a few months.

3.) If I wasn't in full nesting mode, I probably would have put off my need to look up ordering new hardware, and Rob would have found it a few minutes later and then see the last part of #2.

4.) If the crib wasn't recalled, I would have Ells in a bit beat up and cherry wood crib (I am not so fond of cherry wood anymore -so 4 years ago-) instead of a cute brand new crib, the color of my choosing.

Ok, the 4th thing is not the biggest deal, but still! Crazy story eh? Kind of makes you want to check some of your baby things and make sure they aren't death traps, because you don't just get this information automatically and that's kind of scary. If any of you have a Jardine crib especially, I would go here, because many models were included in this recall.

Now, we really must say good bye to Scout's crib with some fond memories:

Good bye ol' pal, thanks for not killing Scout.

No snails allowed in my mom's garden

That's what this says.

Scout is my little champion and this evening while I made a little dinner, she made this sign on the back porch for me. I swear I haven't even brought up the snails for like a week. They have been a non issue for a while now, as I pulled out the big guns and bought snail poison. They didn't learn their lesson being taken to snail Wyoming and one morning after finding 4 complete plants totally ravaged in one night by my wicked little army, I decided the gloves were off (these were NEW flowers I might add, ones purchased and planted to replace the other row of flowers the snails had consumed that I had planted a few months ago). So, we bought snail poison and let me tell you, there was a snail blood bath in my yard. I will admit that there was far far far more glee then remorse when I saw the carnage. I haven't looked back. I added a couple of these signs to my yard, there was only a small area treated, and I never see animals around our yard, so I wasn't too worried, but thought it was worth making these as a courtesy:

FYI Sue, Home Depot had a product called "sluggo" that claimed to be safe for household pets. It was twice as expensive, so I decided to go with the harmful stuff (which is only harmful for a few days). And FYI Cat, it smelled like beer.

Anyway, I think my sign was the inspiration for Scout's sign, especially since she told me she was going to make a sign for the front yard (which is where the snail problem was, and the signs I made), the other possibility is that we picked our first ripe tomatoes from the garden today and while the snails can mess with mom's plants all right, it suddenly got personal, because NO ONE messes with Scout's tomatoes.
I should note that upon coming inside Rob and I were in the kitchen and heard a yell/scream come from Scout and I investigated and on our back door was a large praying mantis that startled her. She was fascinated after the initial shock, but anyway here is her sign for the front yard:

This one says "no other animals either".

The "other animals" are in order of picture: cat, dog, snail, praying mantis and bee (I had to cut off bee in the second pic to get a better close up). The bee one is because Rob had a war (and blood bath of his own) on 24th of July weekend. His was with about 6 wasp nests all around our house. One was giant that was like the neighborhood birthing ground for wasps. He watched wasps coming in from all over including the park to see what happened to their larvae. It took him days of work and bottles of spray to get them gone forever. Scout was kind enough to have her daddy's back as well while making the sign.

Her praying mantis just kills me.

I am happy to report that our house is a snail and wasp free environment as of now. We're grudgingly keeping the crickets (for now).

Lola

We went down for a visit to see the pups today, since we were second in line to pick, and all but 3 are claimed, there was quite a line behind us waiting for us to make our decision. After spending some time with them, we made the very tough call. We are going with "red".

Watching her and observing her build, coat, markings, etc. We came to the conclusion that she's the best. It was a very tough call against mint green. Red is the most playful and a bit bigger. Mint was a dainty little lady, we were told she is the cleanest eater and quite relaxed. These were VERY tempting attributes, but when all was said and done, Red's personality and build won out. **You can all laugh at us in a year or two when we have this ball of curiosity and playfulness when we could have had a proper little lady, but what can you do? Our guts said Red-- she was our Lola. We also decided that environment will also have a heavy hand in how our little girl turns out, and we are laid back people, and these dogs are still so little, so it's hard to tell what's going to happen at this point. So meet Lola, she will be coming home to us the weekend of the 23rd. We can't wait, and as my dad put it, "say a prayer for the idiots".



**I had to add this picture, it wasn't in my radar when I looked at the pics we took the first time, but found the belly rest fairly funny today. I think she likes the shelf.**

I'm a Mormon in Cedar Hills Utah

I just have to speak out about what is going on in my town.

First off, I live with my family in a town in Utah that is (according to a statistic I read) OVER 90% LDS. As you may imagine, this has made it a crazy hotbed of religion crossing over to secular decisions over the years. Before 2005 apparently, there was a law against businesses being open on Sunday and also a law against beer being sold in the town. In 2005, a referendum overturned this and now it is ok. For all my non LDS readers that may not know too much about my religion, we are urged not to drink alcohol and we also are urged to "keep the Sabbath Day holy" which basically translates to having a day of rest- rest from everyday work, school, eating out, shopping, etc.)

Enter Walmart. It opened it's doors this year around March, and underestimating my "quirky" town, opens it's doors on Sunday like every other Walmart in the country. Now, we all know how I feel about Walmart, but let us leave that for this post, as it has nothing to do with this issue. It is no secret that the store is doing poorly. Is it the economy? Perhaps. Location? Doubtful, as there are very few stores in the area. There IS a petition going around however on people banning it out of principle until they close their doors on Sunday. How many people are actually doing this and making a true impact on the sales? I have no idea.

Why is this happening? Someone PLEASE logically explain it to me. As already stated, I am a Mormon, I try my best at keeping the Sabboth Day holy. I drive past stores open on Sunday and guess what? I don't go. (In all honesty, I am not perfect at this. I admit to picking up a thing or two on Sunday if I need to. It isn't ALWAYS medicine for a dying baby, but it also is never a full cart of stuff that can't wait.) I also have been known to go out to dinner with family on Sunday on occasion. It is never mine or my husband's choice, but if someone is in town that is going out and we want to see them, we go, because we feel like it is also important to spend time with family, even if they aren't LDS and share my beliefs, but they do have limited time during the week to see us (or during vacation out here). So, in light of that,* gasp*, I'm not perfect, but I do try, and I weigh my decisions and I once in a while, *gasp again* make a mistake.
Back to driving past a store on Sunday and not stopping to shop, that is called "choice" or as my religion likes to call it "free agency" I am faced with a decision of what is right and what is wrong and I chose one. As I understand it, this is a fundamental part of being a member of my church. We follow the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus is the one in heaven that decided we should all have free agency (Satan was the one that wanted no choices for anyone). I use my free agency everyday. I don't always make the right choice, but having a choice is life. I believe I am blessed more when I have a choice and make the right one then when I do the right thing because there is no other option.

With all this in mind, why are people in my town so bent on losing all choice? There are (albeit few) people in my community that aren't LDS. Which actually boggles my mind as I think if I weren't, there would have been an Emily shaped hole in my wall long ago. I was at the park the other day and some guy I met asked me point blank what ward I was in. You know what? I was offended. Don't get me wrong-- I am proud to be a Mormon, I think it's a nice thought that perhaps my countenance led this guy to believe that there is no way I am anything but Mormon, but I think more likely, he "played the odds" and asked me because there is a very good chance that I do in fact belong to a ward. I was offended for the nice mom that may not be LDS and has to answer that question for the millionth time.

A funny thing about me is, I like diversity. I like differences in people. I like being around people of other religions, race, shape, hair style. So why the *beep* am I in this town? Rob and I ask ourselves that everyday. We don't belong here. We don't feel comfortable here. We don't want to raise our children here. I want Scout to experience choices, so she knows how to handle them. I want her to know that she doesn't have to wear shabby chic or Sundance chic (a style sported around here I have labeled myself), she doesn't have to have her house decorated a certain way, because everyone is different and that is the spice of life. There is no spice here. In fact, spice has been sucked out of every corner of this place and it wilts me. Rob and I are wondering when exactly the Mayor and the City Council will just screw it already, and build a huge city wall around the town and make you scan your temple recommend for entrance. Because that is what it feels like they really want to do, that WOULD pretty much secure that no LDS people may enter and bring their non Mormon ways into our dear city. Too much? Perhaps.

Anyways, I think I made my point and got a little off my chest. There is a lot more, but Rob needs the computer. Perhaps I will add a little more later, for now, I would like to close with a nice thing I can say about my town. My neighborhood does feel safe. I feel good having Scout play outside and even out of my sight for a minute or two at a time. I think it has more to do with the very quiet streets and traffic -which we had a more then modest amount of in our other residences- then to the fact that it's a very Mormon neighborhood. The people that our back yard faces aren't LDS, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh watch out!