so a lot of people have been asking...what about the doggies?

i'm glad to say that they're adjusting very well to the new person in our lives. better than i'd expected actually.



before we brought jia home from the hospital, my husband brought a little blanket and hat home that she'd been using for them to smell.

our little dog numa looked slightly horrified when she first met jia...like she knew that she had been dethroned. numa has kind of been the queen of our house.

our bigger dog, bindi, became jia's personal body guard from the start. i think she might have known something was going on even when i was pregnant. we'd go on lots of walks together, and she started becoming extra protective of me.

now she treats jia like she's her own baby...she's constantly checking on her to make sure she's ok, and she cries if she's separated from her! if jia cries, then bindi comes running!

so all in all i'd say the transition is going well...actually much better than i'd imagined. i'd heard the first six weeks with dog and baby can be tough...so i'm very thankful!



and jia doesn't even flinch at the sound of barking now...i guess it's true that babies get accustomed to sounds they're used to hearing in the womb...thank God! :)



jia is two weeks old today...so hard to believe!!
it's been so fun these past couple weeks getting to know her.

ok, so i dunno what's going on, but for the past 3 weeks it's been like doggie plague at our house.
the pups are dropping like flies over here!

mowgli has been hit the hardest. the poor ol' man has more issues than lindsay lohan.



he thankfully just pulled through some nasty pneumonia, though he did have a close brush with death.

he's definitely all perked up now though after a few days on IV, and having to take about 10 pills a day!

yesterday morning though we woke up to find him covered in blood. randomly. that's always scary.

i was already half way thinking of going to the vet (even though i've spent waaay too much time there lately!) for bindi anyways, because she had a really nasty hacking cough. so i just loaded those two kids up and headed over to our home away from home. :P



it turns out that this time mowgli basically had a giant exploding zit. sorry if that's tmi, but it was a huge sebaceous gland that ruptured and spewed every where. the vet said he would normally just remove it so that it won't give anymore problems, but since our little guy is also a heart patient he didn't want to give him any unnecessary surgery...even if it's minor. so we just added yet another pill to mowgli's diet. and he's none too thrilled about it.



bindi...our super tough dog...it turns out has a bad case of seasonal allergies. it's spring time!! so she's on steroids and antihistamines.

thankfully the vet waived our office visit fees this time and just charged us $6.50 for all the meds. i guess that's one of perks of being a frequent client. :P hopefully our next visit there won't be for a long while though!

ps- for anyone wondering, numa is thankfully still plague free...though she's super jealous that everyone else keeps getting "medicine"...at least she thinks she is!

so remember our great idea to take a dogcation? (=vacation with our dogs)
well, i still think it was a nice idea, but this year it was kind of a fail.

since it's a million degrees in texas, we decided to drive up to the rocky mountains to beat the heat with the pups a couple weeks ago!

however, word to the wise...make sure you get a vet check up before taking your dog to a high altitude! we almost lost a pup!

poor mowgli. our little old man.
what started off as lethargy turned into a cough and difficulty breathing, until his face turned blue, and we took him to the vet in colorado, who loaded him up with meds and told us to drive back to texas as fast as we could!

apparently our poor momo has congestive heart failure (and possibly a heart tumor, but we're praying it isn't!). the vet said that this is an underlying issue that had been building for awhile (though his annual check ups never picked up on it!), and is common for his age and breed.

the good news, hopefully by taking this trip we caught his heart problems earlier than we would have otherwise. with the right medication we will be treating him sooner, and hopefully still have him around for a good long while. say a prayer for him though!

i'm talking about it nonchalantly now, but this happened a couple weeks ago. i've been too traumatized to share before now. but mowgli is pretty much back to acting like his old self, so i'm able to breathe again!

i guess the vacation wasn't a total fail.
we did have a fantastic time before mowgli decided to almost kick the bucket.


look, the dirt matches my hair! (in route near amarillo)

bindi matches the dirt too. :P (and doesn't she look like she's heckling in this pic?!)


great sand dunes national park, co


yes. it's giant sand dunes randomly in the middle of the rockies!




i think mowgli was still having fun at this point too...


our little mountain retreat! it was a 100+ year old guard station. if you ever want nice and cheap vacation accommodations, be sure to check out the national forest service!






our good friend abhishek met us for a day, and we drove up into the mountains on the back roads with his subaru...and got a little lost too! ;) but hey, we're still alive. navigators extraordinaire.




it looks small from here, but that was a huge waterfall coming off the mountains!






ruins from an ancient city of cliff dwellers in mesa verde national park. definitely go and see this if you ever get the chance.


our cute little dog friendly B&B. this was a historic inn, and we actually stayed in the room that teddy roosevelt supposedly stayed in when he passed through the area!

unfortunately our vacation ended here. telluride and santa fe were still on the agenda, but we had too book it back to texas to get our sweet baby home asap.

but maybe another year. i'm sure there will be other summers that we'll need to escape the texas heat...just maybe not with the pups.

ok, so part of the reason i started blogging here wasn't to just talk about big life happenings... but to also capture the day to day little things that our lives are made of.

so that those happy little moments don't just fade into forgotten memories.

i guess basically what i'm trying to say is that if you're looking for excitement, you may not want to read today. but if you don't mind mundane daily life, then you're welcome to take a walk with me and bindi!

bindi needs daily exercise. a lot of it. without it she's the goddess of destruction.
so she has certainly been my inspiration in exploring all the paths and parks of our neighborhood.

and we've found our favorite route. we take this walk/jog about 4-5 times a week, and it usually takes us almost an hour, so it's a nice little workout for both of us.

most of my mornings start with bindi stalking me as soon as i sit down to drink my chai.

this is her begging to go for a walk pose. how can i refuse?
she will harass me until we go, so she's a great workout buddy for accountability.

this is my favorite walk for the scenery, and bindi's favorite for the squirrels.
when you exit our alley, you enter right onto a nice walking path through a park.

these paths go for a couple miles all around the neighborhood, and i LOVE them.

bindi and i take these paths down to our favorite neighborhood park. we usually pass a few bikers and joggers on the way.

this is the view peeking over a bridge into a creek...we're almost to our favorite spot!

waterfalls!

isn't she cute?

i just think this is a cool looking wall. but bindi only cares about the squirrels.

this time of year the walk is extra pretty...because as soon as you emerge from the woods, you find yourself in the middle of wildflowers!

excuse the crazy hair. i just felt the need to get in a pic!



squirrel?

better luck next time bindi.

back in the neighborhood...gotta behave now.

ok, i think all this picture taking is starting to weird bindi out.

home! bindi takes a nice long drink from the goldfish pond...

...and then it's time to recharge!
what a life!

well, i hope you enjoyed our little walk!
reading blogs burns calories too...i promise! ;)

since i've been talking about my mutsy dog this week, i just thought i'd take the opportunity to share about some dogs that really stole my heart on our trip to india.

the indian street dogs. or pi dogs.
pi being short for pariah. pariah meaning outcast.

by their name, you can tell that not many people take them in as cuddly house pets. but the streets of mumbai are filled with them. scrappy little dogs who clean up after society.

these dogs are 10xs smarter than any dog that i know. the can cross indian street traffic better than i can! they may be smarter than me. i've literally seen them look both ways and weave the traffic like frogger. it must be due to generations of natural selection.

they stay out of peoples way...just lurking to find some trash to eat, or a shady spot to sleep.
many of these dogs have seen a lot of abuse. they cower if you reach out your hand to them.

however, i also found them to be some of the sweetest and most gentle dogs i've ever met.
i would freak out my inlaws in india by trying to pet every street dog that i saw! most of them, even though they were wary in the beginning, would be so happy for affection once they learned that i was their friend.


so my husband and i decided that we're going to be advocates for these dogs. there are probably billions of these sweet and intelligent street dogs in india, yet no one wants to adopt them. if people get dogs there, they will usually import a pomeranian or some kind of foreign breed. and most of those breeds are not at all suited for life in the indian subcontinent like the pi dog.

pi dogs are hardy. and cute. and smart.

so anyways, that's my two cents on that issue. if you live in india, please adopt a pi dog. even in the US, muts are awesome people.

i would say that the pi dog of the USA these days is probably the pit bull. of course they don't roam the streets here, but they're kind of the social dog outcast. people have bred them for the wrong reasons, and given them a bad rep. if you go to an animal shelter, the majority of the muts you see look like they have a bit of pit mixed in.

bindi is kind of a social outcast mix. there's no way of knowing her true ancestry, but to me she looks like a mix of pit and pi dog. but i'm telling you, even though she is the biggest and strongest, she is also the sweetest and gentlest natured of all of our dogs.


with her surgery and being in pain this week, it's really had me thinking about God.

weird and random? yes, maybe. that's how my mind works.

i was reading a book last year though by one of my favorite authors. cs lewis. he was talking about the problem of pain...on how God can allow it. he said (in a much more eloquent way) that maybe sometimes it's like when you take your pet to the vet...

you know that the pain is going to make your dog better. the pain will lead to it's healing. but there's no way you can tell your dog that. there's no way that they would understand. all they can know is the pain that they're feeling now. that something horrible is happening to them.
all they can do is trust you.

but i still feel awful seeing my pet in pain...pain that it appears that i'm the cause of....even if it's for their own good. i can't explain it to them. it makes me wonder if God ever feels the same way.

or what if God made us responsible for these creatures to give us some kind of window of understanding...to try to explain these things to us in just some small way?

who knew how bad a vet could botch a spay?
well, unfortunately we found out. and so did bindi.

bindi is the pup that we found, and fostered, and then ended up keeping for ourselves. she's a bundle of mutsy energy and fun.
but not so much today.

she was spayed more than a year ago, when she was just a 6 month old pup. but then a few months later, she went into heat!

i asked our vet about it (not the same vet who spayed her), and he said that a small piece of her ovary was probably missed in the spay, which releases enough hormones for your dog to have a heat, even if they can't get pregnant.

so yeah, each heat cycle is messy. blood drops everywhere. gross.
but if bindi couldn't get preggo, then we didn't see the mess as good enough a reason to have her put under again and go through all that. and a heat only comes twice a year anyhow.

well, at least that's how we felt...until she had a false pregnancy.
bindi basically thought she was the mama of four squeaky toys and a bone for a couple weeks. she could go no where without them, and would groom them and talk to them. it was really adorable and sad at the same time.


so we called the animal hospital who did the spay.

they told us that the vet who had done the operation was no longer with them *ahem*, but that next time bindi went into heat to bring her in. if there was a small piece of ovarian tissue left in there, then during the heat would be the most likely time to find it since it would be swollen.

so...of course bindi started her heat this time during icemaggedon.
the vet was closed all last week, but we were able to get her in first thing yesterday.

a normal spay incision is 1-2 inches, but since they didn't know where a piece of ovary might be floating around, so they had to make a 7-8 inch incision to do an exploratory surgery.

what they found made me seriously question the sobriety of the original operating vet.

they found half her uterus, plus both her ovaries!

i cannot imagine how someone could take out half a uterus and call it a day! missing a small piece of ovary is something i could maybe understand, but not this!

anyways, bindi is hopefully all taken care of now. the animal hospital is of course covering all the expenses...i think they're eager to smooth things over.


poor baby. seeing her down makes me so sad.
our dogs are like a part of our family. seriously our furbabies.
i imagine someone will get extra spoiled this week.