AN UPDATE!

It's been awhile since I wrote an exciting update for you about our fascinating lives, but this seems like a good time to do it.  And to start with, I will tell you that yesterday was the first day of a Whole New Year, which is called 2013.  But maybe you already knew that.

Anyway, now I will tell you about more interesting stuff, which has to do with us dogs.  Except that Nicky is really the only one of us who has much going on.  Lately, Nicky has been peeing in the house quite a bit, and that is driving Mom nuts.  If she goes away for more than 2 or 3 hours, Nicky usually pees on the rug by the back door.  Or sometimes he pees on the rug at the bottom of the stairs.  Or on both.  So now Mom puts a belly band on him when she leaves, and she puts one of those thick pad things in it to soak up the pee.  This works if she is just gone for a little while, and Nicky only pees once.  But if she is gone longer, the second peeing goes all over the rug.

Oh, and sometimes Nicky gets up in the night and goes downstairs and pees by the back door.  Mom doesn't usually hear him in time to go down there and let him out because Mom is sleeping.  Sometimes Nicky just pees on the rug in the hall outside the bedroom, and Mom hears that, and then she has to get up and roll up the rugs and clean up the floor.

Anyway, Nicky is taking prednisone because of his inflammatory bowel disease, and that is probably what makes him have to pee a lot.  But Mom thought he was peeing even more than he did on a higher dose of prednisone, and that maybe he had a urinary tract infection, so she took him to see Dr. Vodraska.  Well, it turned out that Nicky doesn't have a UTI, but guess what he does have:  a heart murmur!  And also he has high blood pressure.

So now he's on drugs to help his blood pressure be lower.  And he will need a sonogram of his heart to learn more about the murmur.  Dr. V said Mom should make an appointment for Nicky with a cardiologist, so Mom did, and Nicky is going there on Friday.

Okay, so that's enough about Nicky.  Now I'm going to talk about kittens.  One of our kittens got adopted a couple of weeks ago.  It was Cooper, the tabby-and-white one.  But we still have the two other ones, Dunlop and Michelin.  Mom was going to take them to PetSmart last Saturday, but then Dunlop was feeling puny Friday night, so Mom didn't take them.  Dunlop has been on antibiotics, and he is all better now, so the two kittens are going to PetSmart this Saturday.  Mom would like to get them adopted because they are big enough to be very pesky and mischievous, and Mom is feeling kind of crazy.  I mean crazier than usual.  Hahahaha!

In other news, Mom keeps trying to hunt down her ancient, dead relatives.  She found pictures of a bunch of them, and she scanned them and posted them on ancestry.com.  And she found pictures on that site that other people had posted of relatives she never met, so she put some of those pictures in her own family tree.

Here's a picture of Mom's great-grandfather, John Allen.  He's the one who came to Missouri from Kentucky on a steamboat.  Of course, he was young then, and in this picture, he is an old man with a long white beard, and he walks with a cane.

This is a photo of John Allen and his second wife, Mary, who was Mom's great-grandmother.  She had lots of brothers and sisters, and Mom is just starting to try to sort them all out.

Mom says I have to stop writing now because she wants to use the computer for some other stuff.  But I just wanted to show you this last photo of Mom's great-aunt and great-uncle when they were children.  They seemed really old to Mom when she was a little girl.  She never saw this photo until she started doing genealogy on ancestry.com.  I think it is a very nice picture, but I wish there was a dog in it!