Oh, hi. I’m back.

Sorry about that folks. Did you miss me? Well, according to my IT department (er, uh, Justin),

“Our web hosting provider has notified us that we are moving to a “bigger better” server, but in order to do that this website will be down. When you ask? sometime between Dec 20 and 22 and the duration will be unknown. So here is your notice and I am crossing my fingers that I don’t loose any pictures!”

I was slow on the draw (and didn’t know what the date was…I thought yesterday was only the 19th), and never got a note out to y’all. But I’m back.

Meanwhile, we got a larger crate for Ginger from some friends of ours, hoping we could help her leg. She’s been favoring her left back leg for a few weeks and we were starting to think it was because we were stuffing her into a crate a little too small for her. Gavin has decided that it is his crate. Wednesday morning he climbed in it instead of putting on his coat to leave in the morning, and stated “I’m going to stay in here” to his father. I was all for leaving him in there with a juice box and his Thomas trains, but Justin coaxed him out and took him to daycare. Later Wednesday night, Justin recorded Gavin singing his own rendition of “Jingle Bells” (with the tag of his pajamas hanging WAY out and Ginger sniffing him) and when Gavin was trying to watch himself sing “Jingle Bells”.

Cooper has been fighting another nasty cough and has almost completely stopped nursing and drinking from bottles and wasn’t sleeping again. Thankfully he’s been still eating his cereal and vegetables (peas, carrots, squash, and now green beans), but it’s a bit troubling that he’s only drinking 1/2 of his bottles all day, and sometimes refuses the bottles outright. So Thursday I called and made an appointment with the pediatrician to rule out ears (sometimes drinking/sucking can hurt if you have an ear infection). Well, that was just a crazy day. Got to work late; ran to the chiropractor during lunch and got there late; got back to work after my appointment late; left the office to pick up Cooper and due to crappy mid-day traffic, got to the pediatrician’s office late, and then Cooper had the audacity to NOT be really sick. Well, he’s sick…he’s got a cold with a nasty gooey cough…but no ear infection or bronchitis. All we can figure now is that maybe it’s teeth. Which is kind of frustrating. You’d think I’d be happy that there’s no infection, but I was actually a little annoyed that it wasn’t anything specific that could be treated. Instead, I got the ambiguous diagnosis that probably drives every mom crazy. So I’ve pulled out the infant tylenol and the teething tablets (which have been like MAGIC!) and we’ll see how he does this weekend…see if I can coax him into taking a bottle better than what he was doing with his teachers all week.

Today Justin brought Ginger into the vet since the bigger crate didn’t help her leg (well, it sort of did, she only hobbled for a few minutes instead of an hour). Turns out the poor puppy has hip dysplasia!!! Check out her x-ray here since I can’t just embed the picture in this article…or put it on my album on Justin’s site and link to it. Obviously I need to consult IT, eh? Well, anyways, Ginger will need surgery…on both hips (since the “good” hip isn’t all that good…just better than the bad hip). Meanwhile she’s on pain killers to help her use her leg again and build up some of the muscle she lost while hobbling around the house (she obviously hid it well for longer than we thought). Seriously. The bake sale is on. I will bake my almost famous apple pies to raise money, and I promise that Ginger won’t lick them too much before I sell them.