Merry Christmas from the Clines

We hope you all have a joyous holiday with those you love!

I'm a winner!

So much of my life makes me feel like a winner on the inside but specifically, I've been winning some contests that make me a winner on the outside too. I have a whole list of online contests that I play each day...partially for fun, partially to see if I can win. Over the last week, I've won $5, $100 worth of concert tickets/concert merchandise, and a $50 gift card to a local nice restaurant! And through Craigslist I've made enough money to buy a nice set of leather couches for our basement (it was a steal!) and a gun cabinet. Justin used to harass me about all of my C-listing but I think I've convinced him that it's been worth the wait and work to supplement our income (and get rid of stuff we don't need anymore) in this creative way. My ultimate gift to him this Christmas was a promise to turn our storage room in the basement into a livable space. I'm more than 3/4 of the way there with a week to go.

Enough about my good fortune though...we're off to take a friend to the hospital for surgery this morning. I've been trying to post videos of Parker's stellar dancing but I haven't gotten it to work on this new computer yet so you'll just have to wait in suspense until I figure it out. I think it will be worth the wait though!

Hooray!!!

It looks like my best friend Carol has begun early labor with her little girl! I'm so excited for Carol, Jeremy and Soren to welcome this little one into their lives and become a family of 4. Congratulations Johnson's and I can't wait to meet her!!!

To appreciate the good nights...

...I feel it's important to document the not-so-good ones.

8:45pm leave Madeleine's room for the third and final time
10:07pm Parker wakes up, give him some milk
12:05am I finally head to bed
1:11am Parker wakes up again, give him more milk
3:20am Madeleine wakes up, Justin goes in and then I get up to rock, dance, and tickle her back to sleep
6:20am Parker's crying wakes me up
6:22am Discover I have a bloody nose (from cold dry air) while getting his milk ready, stuff tissue up my nose because he's really starting to cry now
6:23am Step in a puddle of Maggie pee while walking to P's room, now have one wet sock...have I mentioned how much I hate wearing a wet sock?
6:30am Out of P's room, in hallway cleaning up Maggie pee, listening to her snore from her chair
6:31am Realize we never turned off the outside Christmas lights ($$$ going off in my head)
6:40am Still cleaning up pee (how much can one dog hold?), hearing P squawking in his crib, resign myself to starting the day

And here I sit typing all of this with a small grin on my face. Maybe that's attributable to knowing that I get to drink hot coffee this morning because the kids aren't up yet or maybe I'm so tired I'm delirious. Either way I'm smiling.

Flippin' freaking cold

Our cold spell is about to snap in the next day or so. With highs in the single digits and lows in the negatives, I've been holed up in the house with the kids since this weekend. In case you wondered what frost looks like inside your house, here are some examples.

On Saturday we took the kids to Caras Nursery for Madeleine to ride the pony, an event she remembers from a year ago when she wasn't even 2 yet! She was again delighted with Molly and Frosty (whom she renamed Wall-e) who took her around and around.

Parker and the Christmas alpacas.

We then headed to a Christmas tree lot to pick out a tree. Our live tree hunt tradition of snow shoeing and cutting down a fresh tree was put on the back burner when the risk of frostbite entered the equation. We still managed to find an acceptable tree and spent that night putting it up and decorating it while the kids slept. Actually, Justin sat, drank wine, and watched "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" while I decorated the tree but he cheered me and offered helpful suggestions :)

It was fun to see the kids' reactions on Sunday morning. It's been tedious convincing Parker that the lights aren't chew toys but he's slowly catching on. He's also perfecting the face plant move. No more black eyes though...his black eye has shifted towards hues of yellow and green. Instead he prefers split lips. If only his bottom half could catch up to how fast his top half wants to move!

His latest habit happens to be an obnoxious one: screaming, for fun. Madeleine immediately screams (crying) in response leaving me to dream of happier places while trying not to go deaf. And he's been watching too many dieting commercials because he's now insisting on having a liquid diet of soy milk and water. The exception is peanut butter Panda Puffs cereal. While Madeleine's personality has always been challenging, I never appreciated her willingness to eat almost anything as much as I do now that I have a picky eater. It's a good thing he's cute.

I'm off to put on my flannel jammies and snuggle beneath my down comforter for the night. Good golly I'm eager to see 20 degrees again.

Black eyed P and Maggie's heart

The last few days have been a bit overwhelming for me. First, Thursday night Parker did a face-plant into the coffee table, hence his new nickname of "black eyed P." The bruise has gotten darker every day leading to more stares as we venture out in public.

Friday morning he slipped and bashed his face leading to a pretty bloody lip. He's managed to not get hurt during the last 24 hours so I'm hoping he's able to stay injury free for a bit.

And then there's Maggie. We have some sad news. Yesterday I let Maggie outside to go to the bathroom and after about 10 minutes without hearing her scratch to come back in (it was 15 degrees yesterday and she HATES being cold!) I discovered that she had collapsed in the backyard. I ran outside to find her having difficulty breathing and she was only semi-responsive. She refused to get up and I couldn't pick her up from the position she was in so I checked on the kids and called Justin and asked him to come home.

While he was on his way, Maggie perked up a bit and I was able to get her inside and she ate a biscuit which made me think maybe I had overreacted. And then a few minutes later she was again immobile on the carpet unable to pick her head up with her chest heaving for air. By the time Justin got home we thought she would die on the way to the vet.

He rushed her over there (our regular vet was closed for the day) and they said that it seemed like a heart problem and they wanted to do an EKG and some ultrasounds. We received a call later in the evening saying that they couldn't regulate her heart rate and wanted to keep her overnight to give her more fluids and try other medications. I was able to visit her at 7:30 and she seemed to be herself which put me at ease. However, when I went to pick her up this morning, the doctor told me that her heart condition is being externally caused, meaning she has a tumor somewhere. Of course he gave me the option to move forward with more invasive procedures to find the tumor and possibly remove it but I just paid $483 to find out she had one. I wasn't ready to pay another $480 for them to tell me where it is and there's nothing they can do about it.

So essentially, Maggie is dying...it's just a matter of time. We currently have medication to give her twice a day to keep her heart rate as steady as possible but the tumor could cause organ failure or heart failure and we don't know how long she has because we don't know where the tumor is or how severe it is. The emergency vet will fax over the paperwork to our regular vet on Monday and I'll get her opinion (which I trust without hesitation). We do know that if we hadn't taken her in she would not have been able to sustain that heart rate for more than a few hours. We are incredibly broken up about this because if we had waited she would have died but now we don't know when she will die or what her quality of life will be in the meantime.

Of course the kids don't understand and Madeleine just keeps asking me why I'm sad. We've told her Maggie is sick and we need to give her lots of love but she has no concept of death (thankfully). I hate this part of loving a pet so much.

Shameless promotion

An article appeared in the Missoulian today about a local guy who is one of four finalists in the Bud Light tailgate approved contest. I'm not a huge tailgater but I do love his idea (would work great for picnics, etc.) and I do love beer. So if you want to help make a Missoulian famous (it'll take me a few more years to earn that status), go here to vote for the Tummy Table. If you want to read the local article about him, you can read it here. Thanks for helping put Missoula on the map!