November Playlist

Hello!

Since I’ve been kind of turning these monthly playlists into mini wrap ups, I figured this was the perfect way to talk about October and why exactly I was staying at a nursing home for a bit.

So, let’s rewind back to around August as it was the month where everything went up a notch.

My dad has a lot of health issues, but at the end of summer, we started noticing he was losing the usage of his right arm. He has had many MRIs and X-Rays in the past few years and the majority of his trouble areas are in and around his neck and spine. He has broken several discs in the past, but now as he ages, he’s continued to add more arches and pains. He has been told to have surgery since I was a kid, but he’s always turned them down for risking his ability to take care of me. If you’ve ever met my dad, you know how stubborn he is, so you wouldn’t expect anything less from him, especially for something like this.

Four years ago, when my mom had her surgeries, I made the decision to staying in a nursing home while she was there in the hospital and recovering, and since she is a nurse at a really great residential home, and at the time where my nana was living, the idea was simple but most importantly practical for everyone involved. I would spend my week there, before going to stay at my sister’s on the weekend. I was having my mom’s co-workers and friends basically take care of me like the rest of the people there. I was even allowed to get my hair cut by the hairdresser there! Honestly, I had a lot of fun spending time with my nana and the other ladies, and of course playing bingo too!

Fast forward to now, the idea of dad having surgery and knowing how indeed stubborn he truly is, made my mom and I make that crucial decision of staying at the nursing home for two weeks. We had made this decision pretty quickly, because we knew if we had it planned out well enough, my parents could essentially forget about me, and focus on dad’s surgery and recovery. We figured it out within a month or maybe less than that, because we discussed it quite a bit beforehand, so it’s difficult to narrow down the timeline.

This time was completely different.

There were things that I expected like my tiny calf muscles screaming at me during the first week because I was rolling around in my wheelchair the entire building, and like my dad, I am also stubborn and rarely asked for help, because I actually liked it. It was when I was pushing my folded bed in breakfast table with some stuff I had I would need for that day, down the massive hall that I was actually allowing myself a break and had someone carry it to my destination, which was always the activity room.

What we didn’t intend on happening was the edge of my knees, all the way down to my ankles and toes would become very swollen. I have never experience this before, it actually freaked us out because my feet felt like balloons and looked like they were going to explode at any moment. After that, I was put on a water pill and gradually it helped with the swelling, but I would still have some issues around the ridge of my feet, especially on my left foot, which makes sense considering I was using that foot to push myself around, but yeah that was a fun little surprise.

I was only supposed to stay there for two weeks, but I kept having the date to go home pushed back… twice.

My nana had moved up north with my aunt and uncle a few months later, so I would be alone this time around, and I’ll be honest I was worried about being on my own, but I was in really good hands too, as the longer I was there, the more I was making friends with the other residents too. This was my first time having a roommate since 2002, and she was a lovely lady and we sat together for meals, and we would go to the different activities. The first I participated in were these weaving pumpkins. They gave us a wired outline of a pumpkin and there were two different types of yarn to us, i went with the skinnier and darker orange whle my roommate went for the Cheeto-like yarn as it was bright orange and very puffy!

Besides doing lots of crafts, they played a lot of games too!

The first full day, not only did I weave a pumpkin, but I played Screamo for the first time ever. What is Screamo you say? Well, like my dad said, it’s like Yahtzee and it is, you have two dices and a sheet with the numbers 1-12 including 12 chips or coins, and the group goes around and rolls the dice and whatever it lands on, like a four and five which adds up to a nine, so you can cover those numbers or eight and one, or just the nine, but it is smarter to get rid of the 1 first as it can be tricky to get it as you cover the others. Once you’ve covered the entire board, you scream it out and win. It is easy to follow and would be really great for kids who have trouble with math, and you could switch it up to subtraction and maybe even multiplication if you feel like getting really creative with it.

Three weeks after I came home, I introduced it to my four-year-old nephew, and he literally kicked my butt in three games. However, I will overlook the loses as he thoroughly enjoyed himself and to me that is even better than winning any game with him. Speaking of which, I will be doing a post about fun games to play during the holidays for Blogmas, so keep an eye out for that coming soon.

I was able to spend my birthday there, it wasn’t planned as I was supposed to come home that weekend, but my gal pals really wanted to throw me a party and I thought it was too sweet to tell them no, so after playing Bingo, we had a party and my mom, sister, Nolan and Kimber came out to help celebrate it. I heard the “happy birthday” song three times and by the second time, where everyone in the dining room sang to me, absolutely terrified me, because I don’t like being the center of attention at all. I felt very loved, which was their intention of course, but again, totally out of my element.

The last day I was there was bittersweet as it was nice. I had a lot of people trying to keep me there, but I needed to go home too. While I was there for four weeks, I had missed my dad (he did come to visit me), Rumer, and the cats. My cat Stormy became fairly sick before I left, he’s been really snotty and his allergies really took hold of him, so while I was gone, I kept getting updates from my parents on him, and I enjoyed the pictures my mom would send me, but my ultimate favorite was this one. He felt good enough to climb up to the back deck, which wasn’t something he could do before I left. My mom was so proud of him she opened the patio door and allowed him to enjoy his lunch on the kitchen rug. He now has a bit of a head tilt, but he seems to be doing better. He has been coming up and meowing to us whenever we call him.

November was chaotic in those first two weeks. I had a really heavy time of the month and then on top of that, I either contracted food poisoning or stomach flu. We think it might’ve been the latter since my mom was also affected by it too, although, she wasn’t too bad, I definitely made up for her that’s for sure! Once I was through with both of them, the month started to perk up a bit. We had to have Thanksgiving two days earlier than usual; my mom tends to work on Thanksgiving, so we try to have it on Black Friday, but we had a conflict with other schedules, so we had it on Wednesday.

While I was in the nursing home, I ended up starting and finishing two books I found there. I read Murder on The Orient Express by Agatha Christie and The Duchess by Danielle Steel (the review will go out on Wednesday!) and I still have my third book which is, The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin. It is about Anne Morrow Lindburgh, who was the wife of Charles Lindburgh, but I actually haven’t been doing any reading lately, which is sad, but I read over 50 books this year so I’m not too mad about it honestly. I’m just not going to enjoy updating my stats on Wednesday because that is going to be a real bitch, but I think once I’m done with all of my blog work for the year, I will be able to get back into it again.

I have one more thing to say, since I wasn’t able to get everything done for my final installment of the “Garden Tour” I will be waiting until January to publish it. I am going into Blogmas content on Friday and will not have time to do anything with it for a while, so I just wanted to give you a heads up on it.

And now, I can finally give you the November playlist. If you would like to hear the rest of the playlist, click here

End Of The End by Blastoyz featuring Reality Test, UNSECRET and Krigare
Rise Up by 2WEI x Edda Hayes
Ghosts by Xandria
Hold Me, Help Me by Halocene
Vivien by Crosses
Wake The World by Epica featuring Phil Lanzon and Tommy Karevik
I Like It by Cardi B featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin
Shut Down by BLACKPINK
Dark Sun by Ros Stephen x Power-Hus
Believer by Lea Michele
What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
House On A Hill by Kamelot featuring Simone Simons

How was your November? What were you listening to?

The Garden Tour | The Beginning

Hello!

I am finally ready to give you the story of our garden. I say “our” because even though I didn’t do the actual tilling, planting and pull vegetables off the stocks, I am still very much a part of the whole thing. I haven’t had much say on the entire thing, but I thought talking about it on here will bring me closer to each of the sections.

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Since we’ve been in this house and after getting our dog Rumer’s fenced yard earlier this year, my folks have been itching to make the front as pretty as possible. We’ve been in this house four years and my mom has had array of hanging flowers on the side deck and eventually the front entrance, but they took the landscaping up a notch once we started to experience spring weather. There were a few times in those early days where the majority of the plants had to go into my dad’s garage for a night or two, so they didn’t develop any frost on their leaves.

The very first thing my parents bought for the garden was a nod to me, as I had found them on Facebook one day and shared it to my mom and she seemed to like them as they arrived a week later. They are sunflower solar lights. They do not need any batteries nor water but just straight sun to shine bright over the space. Originally, they were going to be in the back deck where I love to spend time hanging out with the cats and reading one of my books, but then my mom wanted some as well. I tried to split them up evenly since it came with 8 sunflowers, but dad ended up scarping that idea as a whole and now we have the majority in the front yard and three are in the back yard.

The sunflowers are in great company to the real flowers along the fence. As you can see from this photo, we have the lights on the inside of the fence while we have a row of plants on the other side, this is actually an almond bush, it was a small section trimmed off the other bush at my nana and papaw’s house. My nana has a section up north and now we have one for our yard.

All of the plants are non-toxic to Rumer so if she does decide to tear into them, she shouldn’t get too sick by them. We’ve had the front part done for five months and she ignores them so that’s great! For the most part, all of our flowers and vegetables are non-toxic to both Rumer and the cats; the cats have hardly made a dent in our gardens. We’ve caught Grumpy, Midge, and Nelson asleep in the big garden in the backyard but they don’t really care about any of the new landscaping, which has really surprised us in the last month or so!

In the front, we have had array of various flowers line up along the fence like the tulips. My parents were really into the tulips, but they were the first to die once we got started with everything. We had orange, pink, and purple tulips and they were so beautiful, but they didn’t really flourish like we thought they would, but by the time we got them it was the end of March, and we were experiencing frosts in the mornings, but we were able to save the hostas and rose bushes they bought throughout March to late April. It was not a good idea to allow my dad to go to Wal-Mart or Menards because he would come home with more plants, especially rose bushes and peppers!

There is a ruse bush closest to the sunflower patch, I will talk more about them in my next post, which was looking really bad at the store and my dad felt kind of sorry for it like Charlie Brown does at the little real tree in Charlie Brown Christmas special. According to them, they left Menards and went around Wal-Mart, but he kept thinking about that sad bush and they literally went back to grab and take it home. Thankfully they did this because it’s been flourishing since the start of April. It is huge! I can see perfectly from the front door and it’s a nice reddish-pink color too! We’re all happy he was able to save it from its humble beginnings and see it evolve over time in the rich soil. If you are really curious, this rose bush is on the left side on the first collage.

While my dad worked mainly in the fence line, my mom focused her attention to the porch. She has had some type of flowers either hanging from the rails of the side deck or on the front steps. We love to make that space in the front somewhat decorated for all seasons!

And since we’ve had a proper porch, she seemed to step up her game with arranging even more flowers around every surface, and we’ve had petunias of various colors like pinks and purples, but she added a couple of different daisies this year, and one of which has become a sort of favorite for me as it has a yellow hue on the outside with a deep purple in the middle; none of us had ever seen this one before but I hope it’ll become a seasonal stable for us.

We also have two cubes at the bottom of the stairs, and there are a bunch of zinnias and another flower we haven’t had before, but they’re called purple waves and whenever I go up next to the screen door I can’t quite see them because of how dad and our family friend built the actual steps and small patio last year, but I’ve learned to live with it as long as they add pretty elements to this part of our home.

Unfortunately, a lot of flowers we planted in the spring are dead, but my parents really enjoy their flowers so as the weather turns, we grabbed others that would relish in the sunlight. The rose bushes are still going strong, but we did replace the tulips with yellow marigolds. The best way to describe what they look like are dandelions when they become bright yellow, but they have more petals, they look like those 80’s or 90’s toy balls with those silky-soft hairs. I hope you understand what I’m saying, because that’s all I have at the moment.

We have a group of marigolds next to the legendary rose bush and it wasn’t supposed to be, but I think of it as a nice nod to my great-great-great Aunt Mary and her husband Gen, short for General in fact! I’ve talked about them a few years ago, my nana and I found a file of letters and photos that were supposed to be put with Mary when she died, but they never were, and everybody has always talked about their love of roses. Apparently, Gen was obsessed with them, they had all kinds and bred different ones, and in one of the letters we found, his pet name for his wife was Marigold, which is so, so sweet! It does make me sad we weren’t able to give her back the file in the end, but it is a nice memory to have for newer generations.

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I’ve been reading the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder on Spotify, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about how they did back on the wild frontier, and even my mom has said things that would make Charles Ingalls very happy too! We had a storm back in early June that was semi violent and shook our tomato and cucumber plants to the point they were bent a little and she said, “I now understand what Pa Ingalls went through when it hailed and destroyed their field.” Thankfully, we didn’t lose anything, and they felt a lot better than while they watched the wind mess with the larger plants.

So, that’s all I can say about the front part of our house and when I come back with my second post, it will be about the side yard and I’ll be talking about how my folks decided to dig further on the eastern side of our property and tell you more about the process of our sunflowers, and if you know me well enough, you know how excited I am to chat about them. And if you’re wondering if they have names like my indoor plants, they do! I also share our first experience of canning the large cucumber harvests we’ve had lately! So, I really hope you have enjoyed reading this first section and continue learning about little homesteading journey.

What kind of landscaping have you done to your home? For those who live in apartments, what are some of your future ideas to create your own garden? What are your favorite flowers/plants?

Life | Changing Of The Seasons

Hello everyone!

Today, I wanted to talk about the changing of the seasons.

At the end of summer, I tend to dwell on the past and the fear of going into a depression spell starting in August like the past several years, I didn’t. I haven’t been pulled into that black hole of sadness, and as much as I have been trying to be proud of this accomplishment, I have been suffering with a different kind of pain, around the the end of August through the middle of October, our weather has a way of going from one extreme to another with small chance of actual autumnal temperatures in between. As of now, September has been trying to cool down gently, but towards the afternoon it could still range in the high 80 degrees (26 degrees Celsius).before coming down into the 60’s once the sun goes down.

The final week of August, I started to have a little bit of pain in my back, and as much as I tried to blame it on my next period, it just gradually got worse as time moved on and before I knew it, I was spending a good chunk of my time lying in bed watching Criminal Minds fast as lightning and really opening up to naps in the afternoons. My way of escaping bouts of annoying back pain is to take a nap. I HATE taking naps–my parents know about my feelings on it, but they also know how stubborn I am about taking medicine to help relive the pain too, so we all have learned to accept our faults as they come!

I have been through this back in spring, and I vaguely remember how much pain I was in but I think this is worse because for once we got to experience a spring so the change of cold to warm weather wasn’t that bad of a shift (at least to me!) but since we are getting out of triple digit temperatures at a fast pace, has been really difficult on my body.

The thing is, it’s not just my physicality being affected by the sudden changes, my energy has been lacking too. This is what makes me mad because I want to do so much that I feel like I’m going to war on my own body. I know when it listen to my body so that’s why I’ve been in bed most days. I just feel guilty afterwards because I’m not able to read or paint any time I want to, so that’s been an issue I am still working on while you read this post. However, there have been some good things about this month that I wanted to share with you.

A few weeks ago, I went outside around five o’clock when our temperatures start to descend a little, so I can go out on the back deck and visit with out cats for a bit. If it wasn’t for the damn mosquitos I’d stay out there longer than 15-20 minutes at a time! Anyways, I was hanging with Nelson, Felix and Stormy, and we were all enjoying each other’s company but my favorite thing of the visit was when Stormy jumped up onto the rails, his little perch, and I went up to him and he lowered his face to me and let me bonk my head to his, twice! Now, for those of you who do not own cats, they do this with their fellow felines and whenever they do it with their humans, it means that they trust you. They consider you as family. I almost cried because I was smack dap in the middle of dealing with my back pain and he must’ve known inside that I needed a little bit of love back.

The next day,, I was able to go outside again and it was glorious! It was my ideal weather, but it was like eight or nine in the morning so that may have helped everything, but as my mom was pushing me out of the doorway, she asked me a question that sort of puzzled me at first. Here’s how this conversation went:

Mom: “When you were out last night, did you see anything in the yard?”

Me: “No, nothing out of the ordinary. Why?“

Mom: “Look to your left.”

So, I look over and at first I couldn’t see anything, but then I moved closer to the rails and I finally saw it. We had a late blooming sunflower growing in our backyard! I was really glad that both of my parents were awake because I just shouting “THERE’S A SUNFLOWER!!” And then I tried to rack my brain on how I managed to miss it last night but obviously it wasn’t open enough for me to notice it on my own, but then I remembered the last time we went up north to visit with family and they had a sunflower that hadn’t opened yet but by the time we went home, it had blossomed and my aunt took a picture of it for us.

If it was out that evening, I think I was too interested in the cats to notice anything else and honestly, this can happen, especially if I have more than one cat surrounding me wanting extra amounts of attention, which if Felix is in one of his moods, he’s usually the one trying to cause fights with others which always seem to back fire on him! And if you are wondering where Stormy was located, he was on the front rail and since the sunflower was pretty short, I wouldn’t had been able to see it unless I went to that side.

The other mystery is, where the heck did it come from? I haven’t had sunflowers since last fall, and dad tried to tell me that’s where he threw them out because the cats wouldn’t go around there (another reason why I didn’t notice it!) to be fed so it is the perfect little area to grow. Unfortunately, it never grew to be like gigantically huge like most but it looked so adorable to be blossoming in the driest spot of the whole yard! And of course, I had my mom take a couple of pictures of it because I don’t know if it’ll ever happen again. Although, my mom did get me a vase full a few days beforehand and they were thrown out around that patch so maybe we will get another one as the fall season continues or into fall 2022!

Okay, well I think that’s all I want to talk about at the moment. I hope you enjoyed this post, even if the beginning wasn’t too positive, but that’s life.

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Book Review: “Glass Sword” by Victoria Aveyard

Hello!

This wasn’t the post that was suppose to go up today–actually I had two I was tempted to work on this week! The first idea will (hopefully) go out in September but we’ll see what truly happens there. And the other was going to be a review of a novella but I honestly don’t want to talk about them. They have to be really great to get the same treatment as L.J.’s “The End Zone” and so far nothing has piqued that far yet.

Anyways, I am absolutely thrilled to talk about my thoughts on the second book in Victoria Aveyard’s “Red Queen” series, which is “Glass Sword.” I have had this book for many years, I’ve tried to read it but would always lose interest in it fairly quickly, and this always bothered me because I want to know what happens next to Mare Barrow.. The lightning girl. I am hoping I can convince my mom to let me purchase books three and four to keep me moving along and be able to finish another series for 2021.

WARNING: If you have not finished with Red Queen or Glass Sword yet, I would recommend you skip the rest of this post! There are spoilers mentioned below so be careful.

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If there’s one thing Mare Barrow knows, it’s that she’s different.

Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.

The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors.

But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.

Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul. 

taken from Goodreads.

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Okay, so, we begin after the events that happened in the Battle of the Bones and we switch into lots and lots of running for both Mare and Cal. They meet the head of The Scarlet Guard, Farley and her gang of soldiers, including a ghost from the past for Mare and head back to a place called Tuck. I remember few details of chaos after arriving there, because I first started reading this part back in mid 2016–honestly much of that year is still a blur for me obviously!–but I feel like it’s fair to say it’s the headquarters of The Scarlet Guard, and Mare and Cal are not well welcomed there, even though Mare’s family are all there but since they brought back a Silver, a exiled prince as matter as fact, and the Colonel doesn’t quite know what to think of either one and locks them up.

By the end of 2019 and start of 2020, I decided to give it another chance and was moving really good for a while but then one day as I was sitting outside with the cats and the one time my cat Stormy decided to lay out next to me, he went to stretch out his front paws and literally hooked one of his dirty claws on the opposite side of where I was reading and as he pulled his paw back to normal just shredded it on both sides. I was horrified at what happened but I do not know what I did to Stormy. Thankfully for him, he hadn’t shared with us on how much he loves belly rubs! After it happened, I stopped reading it, the only reason why I went back to it this year was because my mom repaired it and honestly spoiled my chances of buying the paperback edition…

I must believe enough for all of us. I must put up my mask again, and be the lightning girl they need. Mare can wait.

My ability or imagination intensified because I was able to see majority of the structures and silhouette of the characters, and when Farley, Shade and Kilorn come to break Mare and Cal out of their stronghold, they walk out of it and immediately feel their powers coming back to them. So, as this scene was progressing I was seeing each of them step over to their rescuers while basically showing off their restored abilities of fire and lightning. Out of everything that happened in this book, this was the scene that played over on a loop everytime I wanted to give up and forget about it again.

Anywho, my overall view of this book was good. It does feel to drag on once you hit the chapters of Mare and the others go out looking for the newbloods and despite the fact that there are some powerful action between the characters and Victoria went into great detail on everything from the buildings of Silver lands and the Notch, However, it makes the reader continuing to read off and on like me, really annoying, which is probably why it took me so long to complete in the first place.

On a positive note, I am excited to get started on the third book in the series, perfectly titled as “King’s Cage” but I will be honest with you, I am worried it’ll become boring in the middle again and as much as I love these characters and want to know what happens next to each one in the next book. I am hoping I won’t have to wait too long but I do have others that can keep me interested for a while.

Have you had the chance to read “Glass Sword” by Victoria Aveyard yet? If you have, what were your favorite scenes, and how long did it take you to finish it?

Meet Our New Puppy!

Hello!

This year has been a little bittersweet for my family as in late March, we lost our beloved dog ChiChi, three days before we left to visit some family up north. For those of you who never had a chance to meet ChiChi, she was a feisty little thing! She barked at literally everything, people, dogs, the cats, and even poor Nolan… We were happy that she had turned her tune of him in the last two months before her passing, but if he was outside and she was sunbathing in front of the screen door she would bark and bark at him for trespassing on her property.

Her death was hard on all of us, but it probably affected my dad the most as they were best buds, although I clearly remember him almost keeping her away from him when we first brought her home. I remember coming home from school and hearing my mom tell me about how they went to Walmart and dad was so worried about her getting stuck in the couch and being like that for a couple of hours, so they ended up taking her with them. Apparently she was stuffed inside mom’s purse because at that time she had a big purse and she told me, it was like Bruiser bobbing his head out of Elle’s bag at the end of Legally Blonde, she was so alert and curious of everything, but this was also before she learned how to be a guard dog too!

When my mom goes to work, it was just the three of us. Dad, ChiChi and I hanging out and fighting against sleeping the whole afternoon. ChiChi would sleep a lot. She was as bad as the cats sometimes! However, when she was awake, dad would cuddle and play with her, until he would venture outside and it was just me and the dog. Once he would leave, it was hard to resist making her sing while inside her blankets in the living room. She loved to howl (sing) to the theme songs of Cops, The Golden Girls, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the operatic J.G. Wentworth commercial. After she died, I have heard that commercial five times and my parents do not watch Cops anymore because that was one of her absolute favorites!

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Since she’s been gone, we’ve had three chances to get a new dog.

I think the main reason why it took so long was because my dad was very committed to the possibility whereas my mom wasn’t feeling the idea at all. I actually remained pretty neutral about it. I understood why dad wanted another dog but also get my mom’s reasons behind it too. I tried my best to talk them into letting my cat Stormy inside instead but neither one thought it was a good idea since he sheds quite a bit and he has never spent a lot of time indoors either.

It wasn’t until late July that my folks were on the same wavelength and decided to search for another dog. They were mainly searching into German Shepherds since they are mom’s favorite breed. I wanted another pittie and I almost got dad to follow along with me until they stumbled upon a couple of Belgian Milionis puppies. They are one of my dad’s favorite breeds, and I think what got his attention is that the guy who was saling them was a police officer or something like that and the father of the pups was his K-9. The guy was also looking for $800 but got him to go down on the price by half and that’s how we ended up with Rumer.

She was born around Memorial Day weekend so she is around 13 weeks (I think) by the time this post goes out, and she has finished with her final shot, and I’m happy to say as the vet was not ChiChi’s favorite person, Rumor loved him! Technically, dad and I spell her name with a “U” instead of an “E” so don’t be surprised if you see some mistakes on here and my social medias!

One of the things that the breeder told my parents was she likes to bite feet… And for the record, she does in fact enjoy this hobby, but the only time she bites me is whenever I try to play with her. For the most part, she would rather lick my feet instead and we are very grateful for it. She is actually incredibly adorable and is already showing off how she will protect you or me in this case. If you want to get close to me, you have to get through her first. She doesn’t quite know the deal about my wheelchair, much less how I go to the bathroom. If dad is helping me, she barks at us. I think she thinks I’m hurting him because she is ALWAYS around dad, but when mom takes me, she barks at her.

She has figured out how to jump into my bed, but not the couch, and I’m sure dad is hoping that day comes soon because she continues to eat like our cats, which is all the time. Speaking of the cats, her welcoming present from Bootsie was a big wack on the head when she went over to sniff at her. Two days later Grumpy got ahold of her as they walking outside for a bathroom break. Rumor is very curious of our cats though, and thanks to our back deck, they are able to see each other and watch the other’s movements. According to my mom, Felix did let her smell him the other day without any attacks so there is hope that maybe some will become friends with her one day.

Lastly, we kept ChiChi’s bed (although she mostly used it as a toy box than a bed!) and since she’s still small, she fits perfectly in it. Unfortunately, she’s ripped a hole in it and now she only has her blanket to lay on but I think she’s better with it, everytime she gets a toy or dental bone she’ll put everything on the blanket. My parents purchased a medium size cage for her and that’s where her food bowl is located but she hates being in it obviously. The other day Nolan came over and we had to put her in it and she actually did better than she had earlier this month.

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When you have lost a family pet, how long did you wait until you brought home another animal? Are you familiar with the breed: Belgian Milionis? Do you have any advice on training or anything else for my family? Please share down in the comments.