Sleepover

Nate, my nephew has only been in a big boy bed for a couple of months. He came in for a weekend and my parents had a date planned one of the nights so he came over to our house to play and spend the night.

Nate has never had a sleepover so he has never had to share a bed with another kid. Anytime TJ has a friend we just through them both in his bed (it is a full size bed) and let them pass out.

It was pretty insane of me to do that but they did pretty good. Nate liked to cuddle up to TJ but he would end up jabbing TJ in the back with a fist or knee. So TJ woke up a few times because of that. Nate woke up at one point and went and opened TJ's door to come find me. Being afraid of my dog (kinda big and scary looking) once he saw her he and TJ now awake at this moment they both started crying and screaming that Gracee was getting them and was going to eat them. Nate just kept crying "puppy, puppy, puppy!"

Pretty funny site now that I'm writing about it but at 3 in the morning....not so funny. Well a little funny.

Considering Nate had never had a sleepover before. He did pretty good. It was a fun memory and we'll definitely have to do that again. Maybe next time they'll both be a little more comfortable with the situation.

Here are some pictures from the evening:

Gracee

Here she is... here is our Gracee!

She is apart of our family, she keeps watch over the house, she licks my kid's faces, she cuddles next to us when we are sick, she thinks she is a lap dog, she is our hyper-lazy dog, she is polite and will leave the room when she needs to scratch, she will also scratch right in front of you...

She can climb and jump over a wooden fence, she can dig under a fence, she is friendly, she is annoying, she has a scary bark, she eats a ton, she acts like she is starving after eating a whole bowl of food, she'll wake us up in the middle of the night so she can chase down a squirrel outside...

She likes to take adventures around the neighborhood if we don't let her back in the house after one bark at the door, she always comes home, she would bark at me if TJ or Anna would cry, she thinks that TJ and Anna are her babies, I think she thinks she is a human...

She is 5 1/2 years old, she is so much fun, she has beautiful coloring, she likes to play with birds but for whatever reason they never survive, she is our dog and....

WE LOVE HER!

Summer Time Love

This is what I love about summer....water, pools, sprinklers, laughing babies, and anything that comes along with those.

TJ loves outside like I've said in the past, but another thing that hangs up there pretty close is water. He loves the bath tub, water hose, pool, and the excitement of sprinklers.

 This is something new that he does...he always just sits there so he is really getting into "playing"

 the focus

 had to get a cheesy grin shot

 Gracee loves playing in the water too but her body hates her for the next two hours. ugh too much water for Gracee's tummy

 The joy in that face...love it

 this created a constant giggle

We really want to have a pool in the future, but we'll have to wait on that. It is kinda nice not having one right now because I don't have to worry about his safety. Maybe one day we'll have one. So right now watching him enjoy the pool leaves Mommy and Daddy over in the shade covered in sweat. As you can see in these pictures we don't have much shade. There is some in the morning but after 12 noon we only have a strip of shade on one side of the yard. That is where the parental units hang out.

New Found Talent

As some of you may know our sweet Gracee is half Catahoula. Catahoulas are working dogs from Louisiana. They can hunt and herd. They hunt basically anything: deer, hog, squirrel, mountain lions, raccoon, and the list goes on. They are also known as “cat” dogs, because they can be trained to climb trees. Now our dog is only half Catahoula and has never known how to do this. Well and we didn’t know how to train her to do this…why would we want our dog to know how to climb trees? She can jump like nothing else. Her last owner trained her to jump into his arms. He called it “hugging”. It took us a bit to get her out of this habit. People would walk in our front door and she would “hug” them.
Well this past weekend she spent a lot of time in my parent’s backyard. Unlike at our house she can’t get under the fence, because they have a concrete strip all the way around the back yard that the fence sits on top of.
We got back to my parents house on Friday night with her greeting us in the driveway. We thought she just got out at the gate by the driveway. Sunday she was back at my parents house during church since Rodney and Virginia were going to be taking her home for the night. When my sister was coming over to church she saw Gracee out front and put her back in the backyard and while Amy was walking over to the church she was greeted by her again. She thought she was jumping over but I still thought she was getting out at the gate. After worship I went to get her back in the house. Instead of just putting her in the house I put her back in the backyard to see if she would get out while I was watching. Yep, she climbed up over the fence. The 1st jump I saw her head pop up, on the next jump there she came. Her whole body came right over the fence. Then she just stood there looking at me. Like ”look mommy, I did it. Aren’t you proud?”
We will be getting her a chain so when she needs to stay out in the back we can just chain her up. Not near the fence line of course. I don’t want her hanging herself.

 

 

Laughter and Dancing in the Kitchen

As Tim and I were getting dinner ready in the kitchen last night I was holding TJ and for whatever reason I had my iPhone playing a song. It was an upbeat song that is good song to get you moving. TJ and I were dancing around and I was trying really hard to get him to burst out laughing. He was smiling and laughing a bit but then I guess we were contagious with our dancing and we got Tim dancing with us. As soon as Tim started dancing TJ couldn’t contain his laughter any longer.  He was laughing sooo hard. It was absolutely hilarious.

Now of course since we were all dancing around the kitchen including Gracee there was no one available to video this event. I really need to train Gracee to do that. Can you imagine what a dog would talk about if they talked. I bet that would be pretty interesting. (sorry for the rabbit trail)

I was just talking to my mom about all that TJ has done new this month. It makes me so proud to watch him learn something new and to be so excited about it. I’ll be posting a 10 month blog next week when he is actually 10 months old…aaahhh!

Y’all have a nice day!

No More Backyard

The part of our day yesterday that I didn't share was the part about Gracee. Now to give you a little history about our dog Gracee and our backyard. When we first moved in she was able to get out of the yard. When she does this she just hangs out in the front yard till we get home so we know how well she did at getting out. Like she is proud of herself.

She did this once when we first moved in and hadn't done again till about a month ago. We both went out to the yard and searched around couldn't find where she got out then forgot about it. Well since we couldn't find where and had left her out there again a few times (without escape) we decided to leave her out there yesterday while we were at the fair. It was a nice day and we knew she would like it out there. We filled up a big bowl of water and put her collar on and headed out the door. 

At about 1:00 I had a few missed calls one from our friend Judy (the one who gave us the dog) and a number I didn't know. Now we got Gracee a tag that had her name and our number on it. The number was worn off and not readable, but the rabies tag was. Which explains why Judy called me. The last time she got a shot was when they took her, so the vet that gave it to her had Judy's number. She gave my number to our neighbor who had called the number about our dog. Ah Hah that's who it was. Well I knew who it was once I listened to the message. It was our neighbor Patty she saw a dog sitting in our yard and wasn't sure if it was ours or not. 

After talking to her an explaining how our fence works and giving her instructions on how to get into the house. (we left it unlocked, oops) We went straight to the place where we had gotten her tag before in the State Fair. But this time we got a tag that attaches to the collar itself and doesn't hang down. Less noisy and convenient so we'll now keep the collar on. Best of both worlds. 

We are so thankful that we have a good dog that will just sit in the yard and such a great neighbor that took care of her. The crazy thing was is that even for that we wouldn't have normally put her collar on, I just happen to see it sitting on the chair right when I was letting her out. 

SOOO no more backyard for Gracee while we are gone until we get holes found and covered. We think she dug out by the gate.

We Are Walking...

Last night after dinner we decided to go on a walk since the weather was beautiful. We got changed and ready to go. We decided to take Gracee with us since she probably needed the exercise and would love it.

We headed off to the park that I had found on Saturday while I was walking with TJ. Once we got there and walked around half of the part that I did the other day and Tim noticed a path that went down to a wooded area. We decided to head down that way and found ourselves on a bike trail that we had no idea where it went. I think we walked for like a mile or so we got all the way to Grand Prairie. We walked under 360 and past that for a while and decided we should probably start heading back since we have a while to walk back. About half way back TJ got tired of sitting there. So we started jogging back just to give him a little more interest and to get us back faster.

I told Tim that the next time I suggest we walk that we don’t have to walk that far or long again. I didn’t want him to say no next time I suggest it. But the up sides are that we got some exercise, We all got some fresh air and we all slept wonderful last night.

We had a really good dinner last night. We got French onion strips and broke them into small pieces and dipped chicken in eggs and then put the onions all over them and stuck it in the oven to cook. Yummy!!

Oh and the best part of all is we wore Gracee out and she didn’t think that 4 am was a good time to go to the bathroom. Way to go Gracee!!