Laurie, Fudge, and Vern's Blog – April 2012 Archive (9)

My husband and I are not extravagant people.  Our vacations consist mostly of driving home to Indiana to see family or to North Carolina to see family.  The people I used to work with always teased me about our vacations, but I didn’t care. “To each his own,” I would say and mean it.  I drive a beat up van with over 200,000 miles on it and enough dog nose prints to make it almost virtually impossible to see clearly out the back window.  In fact, it appears as if a jar of Vaseline went…

This morning I called my mother like I do almost every day and got her just before she had to leave to go exercise.  The times you can call her are very specific because she is either leaving to play Bridge, watching Matlock, watching The Price is Right, or out the door for some other reason.  I could be in the middle of telling her I was having chest palpitations and could she hang up and call 911 for me and I can assure you I would be screwed if it happened during one of her…

I have had this blog written for a long time, but I did not want people to think Fudge was sick now.  This happened shortly after we brought her home and goes to show that having a sick dog/puppy can be very scary. Since we have lots of new puppy owners, I thought it would be fun to share.

When Fudge was pretty small, she got sick. She stopped eating and drinking, was very lethargic, and I was beyond…

I can already tell this is going to be a bad season for ticks.  We had five this weekend and that was after a walk in the park.  They are almost always on Vern, which we believe happens because he likes to do his business in tall grass and if he swims, he gets out of the water and rolls himself, with such joy and abandonment, all the way to the car. I love watching him roll, because he thrusts his legs up in the air and kicks like an upside down frog trying to right himself. …

This week has been a tough week.  I know I shouldn’t complain when there are people so much worse off, but that has never stopped me before.  My husband has had something wrong with his foot for almost three weeks and will not go to the doctor.  He says it is sprained and I think it is broken.  

While he pops Advil, I pop M & M’s and neither one are helping…

It started with a whiff.  I smelled something strong and unpleasant in the air and after double-checking that I hadn’t forgotten to apply my deodorant, I started focusing on the most likely suspect, Vern.  I was sure it was Vern, but he didn’t smell any worse than usual, so next up was Fudge.  At last, I located the smell and sure enough, it was Fudge. The only explanation that I can think of why my clean Fudge ended up smelling badly was that maybe Vern rolled over on her one night while…

When we got Fudge, I don’t remember what research I did on the computer regarding Doodles, but I remember the no shedding was the icing on the cake.  I had spent years vacuuming up after two Labs and for a short haired dog, those dogs shed like nobody’s business.  A Labradoodle seemed like the best of both worlds for our family.  The wonderful personality of a Lab combined with no shedding just seemed perfect to me.  Luckily for us, without knowing what we were doing, we decided on…

I worked almost my entire adult life.  I took a small break when I had my first daughter, but still worked part time, and after we had our second daughter, who had some very major medical problems, I could not go back to work until she was three.  We needed the money, but our youngest daughter had a Tracheostomy tube and a feeding tube and it wasn’t until she was about three and stabilized, that I could find anyone willing to watch her.  Luckily, I had a great boss that allowed me very…

Last year around this time, I fell in love with a cranberry leather sofa and since our living room couch was almost twenty years old, worn, and faded by the sun, we decided to place the order for our new couch.  My kids will tell you that when we bought that sofa in 1992, I guarded that sofa like a mama bear does her bear cubs.  Up until that point, most of our furniture was hand me downs and that sofa represented our first major, expensive purchase.  I knew there was not going to be another…