This is where Maggie had to be when I was helping Owen sort clothes in his new room.
Category Archives: Maggie
This cuddle hasn’t happened in awhile.
Loving my lap!
Relaxed Maggie
Maggie spends most of vacation sleeping…either on my lap or a blanket on a chair. (She’s a really good dog and knows to only lay on a blanket on the leather furniture. If the blanket slides off, she will usually lay on it on the floor!)
Maggie…waiting.
Patiently waiting her turn for a drink while Charlie dips her paw and licks water off it. Slowly.
It’s like she’s saying “Are you kidding me with this?”
And now she’s waiting for the window seat! 😂
Don’t worry. Maggie gets her fair share of time in the bed. But that said, she is a pushover. If she’s somewhere the cat wants to be, Charlie will push her way in and kick Maggie out.
Katie wanted to dress up for her holiday party and ended up borrowing a dress from her best friend Sophia. Then she wanted to wear her Santa hat…and have her picture taken with Maggie.
Then Maggie watches her buddy go off to school…
This dog kills me.
Blizzard!
They were predicting a blizzard Sunday night but we didn’t believe them.
And then it started snowing thick, wet heavy snow.
And then the kids went to bed.
And then school was cancelled Sunday evening.
And then Tom got the call he had a late start.
And then the power flicked off and on about four times over an hour.
And then it went off for good about midnight. Hoo boy.
Katie woke up during one of the brief outages because the backup power supplies were beeping and we were running around trying to turn things off… So we told her there was no school and she could sleep in…and that daddy would be here in the morning.
The power was still off in the morning so Tom built a fire in the fireplace and it did a decent job of keeping the living room comfortable (70°). Unfortunately the fireplace is meant for looks and not heating so the flue doesn’t really work so the fire burns fast and hot and we went through wood like crazy (thankfully we had lots of wood from the free stuff I got this summer). We assumed that everyone was without power, but all our friends had power. Turns out, there were about 250,000 people in the greater metro area that lost power!
I hadn’t seen snow this heavy and wet in a long time—these bushes are normally chest-high and completely away from the sidewalk. This morning? About knee-high and covering most of the sidewalk!
The kids played outside most of the day with friends…moving from yard to yard and house to house. They had to dry their snow gear in front of the fire.
Katie kept trying to use things that needed electricity and wondering why they didn’t work. I cooked on the gas stove. As time wore on, we eventually brought out a cooler to put some of the refrigerator stuff in outside since it was getting warm. (It was freezing outside so the stuff would be just right in a cooler.) The freezers were okay because we hadn’t opened them.
The day wasn’t too bad while it was light out—there was lots of animal cuddling warmth—
but then once it got dark (at 4pm!) we had to go pull out all our candles!
We kept checking our power status on the website and this is the only thing we saw all day:
It was frustrating. But I was glad I was still able to use my phone and stay connected. (Using Low Power Mode and turning the Brightness way down reaaaaally conserves battery life. Plus I used one of our external battery packs.)
You know the animals are desperate for attention (or warmth) when they cuddle together on me. Usually it’s one or the other because one kicks the other one out.
At bedtime it was a chilly 52° upstairs so we got out lots of extra blankets and sent the kids to bed a little early. A friend invited us to her house the following day if the power didn’t come back on. Just as we were getting into bed under our six layers (and me in top and bottom long johns, pants, and a hoodie—complete with the hood up!) the power came back on about 9:30! So we had a mad dash throughout the house to make sure everything was turned off (somehow both of Owen’s bedroom lights were on?!) and the furnace turned on. It had been about 22 hours without power.
I don’t think we’ve ever been without power for that long…and we lived through 25 years of Michigan winters and a few hurricane systems in North Carolina. I don’t want to do it again.
You know they’re desperate for attention…
You know they’re desperate for attention (or warmth) when they cuddle together on me. Usually it’s one or the other because one kicks the other one out.
This is what happens when you try to move her at night.
Maggie is insane…ly comfortable.
She doesn’t look too out of the ordinary here, right?
But look at her from another angle…
She slept that way for about a half hour!
Oh come on Maggie. Really?!
She doesn’t hate the vet, she just doesn’t really like the waiting.
The vet gave her a clean bill of health. She’s getting old but thankfully she’s still pretty healthy. 🙂
Someone isn’t happy Charlie is on my lap.
Someone is comfy.
It was rainy so she wasn’t terribly happy but she wasn’t in a full-blown panic so this comforted her temporarily.
Maggie approves of the cushions.
And later she approved of my lap.
Well, that was a nice two-hour nap.
Storms are pushing through which means Maggie was attacking her crate trying to get out. Which means she woke me up and now I get to deal with her until the storms pass. How do I do this? By closing all the bedroom doors and going downstairs to “sleep” on the couch so she’ll hopefully keep close to me instead of waking everyone else up. And then Charlie joined, too. Needless to say I don’t get much sleep.
Finally! A decent road trip meal with the kids and the dog!
We usually eat fast food on road trips because we are trying to save time or we can’t leave the dog in the car…but today we found a place that had a patio so we could actually stop for a decent road trip meal (she’s under Tom’s chair).
Someone was being grumpy and didn’t want their picture taken.
But this one let me.
Second day in a row but still no bites.
Katie was all gung go about fishing… until nothing was biting and it was boring.
This is how she ended up “fishing.”
The only thing Tom caught!
Sun Dog on vacation.
It’s time to go get the kids.
Maggie was READY to go. Once she got outside while I was loading the car, she did NOT want to go back in and she just stood there waiting.
Unfortunately Tom didn’t get out of work as early as he’d hoped so we didn’t get on the road until 4…and with an 8-hour drive (well, 7 actual hours but 8 with the time change) plus construction and rush hour traffic…we didn’t pull in until almost 1:30am. Yuck.
But, because we could, we picked an awesome-sounding BBQ place on Yelp as we drove down the highway, called in an order, and picked it up within 15 minutes…eating in the car as we continued down the highway. Easy peasy. And then we took about seven minutes and stopped for ice cream along the way as well. We even got Maggie a dog ice cream which she wanted no part of. Kids! 🙂
Grayling sun dog.
Katie loving on Maggie.
Maggie usually hops into bed with me after Owen lets her out of the crate. This morning Katie hopped in, too, and gave Maggie some snuggles.
Camp Cadillac
We spent the day in Cadillac with Tom’s extended family at a local campground where the kids enjoyed meeting new friends and playing in the pool.
Katie liked the animals. (Yes there were animals there. She especially liked the goats.)
Maggie didn’t bark once all day…until she got in front of the goats. At which point she thought she was ferocious.
After some visiting I just amused myself. There might have been margaritas involved.
Maggie is ready to go!
I put Maggie’s collar on in preparation of our road trip and she is ready.
Dual lap warmers
MEOW!
A girl and her dog.
Two cuddle bugs.
Maggie scared the hell out of us tonight. Again.
It’s hard to get back to sleep after you’ve been awoken at 3:30am by your dog screaming (seriously, that’s the best way to describe it…and it’s seriously awful) because she’d gotten her mouth/snoot/teeth hooked between the bars of her crate and her paw was bleeding from scratching at it.
If Tom wouldn’t have been here I’m not sure what I would have done. We didn’t even have tools big enough to cut the wires—he had to bend them with brute force until they broke.
We wondered what on Earth was going on…until we realized it was raining again. She must be REALLY messed up from that lightning strike.
(Much after the fact we both said we really wish we would’ve gotten a picture of it because it was truly unbelievable. Honestly, I had thought about getting a picture but I had left my phone upstairs because we hadn’t expected to find anything insane…and we were too wrapped up in extracting her safely to worry about it.)
So we bandaged her paw and Tom stayed up (since it was almost his normal waking time) and I was up—trying to calm down—until about 6am when I finally crashed.
This is the solution Tom had come up with by the time I rolled out of bed at 9:30.
It’s not perfect but we really don’t want to let her free roam if we can help it as she tends to move around quite a lot at night and wakes us up.
She doesn’t seem too worse for the wear. Thankfully.
These two love the bean bag.
Ha! It’s not who you thought, is it? (We sold our couch in preparation for a new couch that is taking longer to arrive than we initially planned.)
