One of my babies is sick.  It’s not one of the four children, thank goodness, but it’s still someone who is a part of our family and means the world to us – our beloved almost 12-year-old dog Charity.

Charity has an aural hematoma, which is basically when a cavity within the ear fills with blood.  It’s very painful for the dog, and poor Charity has been slowly sauntering around the house in a daze; I can’t stand it.  The good news is that we have a vet appointment tomorrow, and the really bad news is that it will cost a minimum of $150, more likely upwards of $300-500 to fix.  But how much money is too much to help our baby?  We adopted Charity as a puppy 11 years ago before we had any kids, and she’s been with our family through countless moves and other episodes in life, both good and bad.  I guess we’re all going to have to be a little patient while my husband picks up some extra work hours so we can pay the vet to fix all of her old dog ailments.

Please pray for Charity to get well.  She is an older dog, and I can’t stand the thought of putting her through surgery.  I really hope she feels better soon!  She’s been sleeping all the time, and there is no one to clean up all the food that the kids drop – the house is getting so messy!  And believe it or not, I actually miss her constant barking…  🙁

I feel like I can barely keep my head above water these days – I’m so incredibly overwhelmed with things to do!  To top it all off, our dog had a huge swollen lump on her face that just kept getting worse so we had to take her to the vet.  It’s an abscess tooth, and the vet also found a few other problems.  In short, we have to decide how much we can afford to fix.  This dog is like one of our kids; we got her before we were even married, and at the time, we had trouble adopting a dog because we were so young and lived in an apartment, so shelters wouldn’t let us adopt.  But finally, we found Charity, and they let us adopt her, and she was the most terrible puppy you can imagine.  We stuck through her puppy years, and by age 2 she was the best dog ever.  She is now almost 11 yrs old and a major part of our family, to say the least.  So anyway, she needs some treatment at the vet and at home, which will increase our busyness considerably.  Add to that some household stuff I’ve been backed up with for months (still haven’t unpacked all my hospital stuff from when the baby was born in July!), and it just keeps getting worse.  It’s really hard to do all the laundry and meal preparation and cleaning up after a family of 6 when I have two little kids to watch all day!  Thank goodness the other two are in school, but between errands, feedings, diaper changes, cleaning up spills and messes, and playing, I don’t have enough time left over for household duties, much less stuff I’m backed up on…  And forget about hobbies; which is why I might have to let my blog go.  I really don’t want to; I enjoy writing on it; especially cuz it gives me a nice way to preserve memories for our family.  But right now, it’s  a source of stress as it’s just another thing I’m trying to work in.  I wish I could be more passive about housework and laundry and stuff like that, but it just bugs the heck out of me when I let stuff go.  And for good reason – I never have the time to catch up on stuff that’s put off until later!  But enough of that, I’m just venting my stress, and also warning you that my blog posts are going to become even more infrequent.  It’s a shame too…  I have a lot left of our trip to FL to share that I’d also like to record in my diary…  might not be able to write about it until 2009!