T-Rex and the Tower

The T-Rex Part:

These are 2 of my favorite comics.  Making fun of T-Rex is just funny.

At least 10 times a day Spencer and I will sing, "if your're happy and you know it clap your.....oh, poor t-rex" while doing little gimpy t-rex arm movements.  We're mildly obsessed with t-rex. So when we went to Gymboree and saw a t-rex shirt, we knew we had to buy it.  Non-negotiable.

The Tower Part:

About 6 weeks ago I saw a homemade learning tower on pinterest.  The printed plans were like 24 pages long.  We were kind of half joking when we mentioned to Michael's dad that he should build one for us in his spare time.

This is the commercially available one.  $199.99

And here is the one that he actually built for us in his spare time.

I think it is 250% more awesome than the commercially available tower.

We are so lucky to have a handy Papa who loves his grandkids.

We took it for an inagural spin tonight.

No more Spencer falling off the step stool because he's not paying attention.

We melted 3 of our chocolate Easter bunnies and made banana pops.  Michael and I will be enjoying ours with a little DVR after the little ones are in bed.

The Parts of the Post That Didn't Make The Title

Elliott:

just because he's nowhere else in here.

Ginger's Surgery

Ginger had massive surgery yesterday.  She had a little bump on her nipple (it looked like a skin tag) that rapidly turned into an angry looking red mass.  I was just starting to think that we should call the vet and take her in to be seen when, in a matter of 2 days, the mass turned into a black tumor. And then the tumor blew up last week. We could not get it to stop bleeding and I thought Ginger was going to hemorrhage to death.  If you had walked into our house you would have thought we had murdered someone. Blood was all over the floor and all over us.  Michael ended up taking her to the emergency vet at 1 am.  I know I mentioned this all on facebook.  I apologize if I already talked about this on the blog.  Anyway, we knew we had to do something and fast because we couldn't risk this thing blowing up again.

The vet removed a huge amount of tissue in case it is cancerous and sent it off to the lab.  We'll know next week what it is.  If it is cancer we'll deal with it, but I am not going to make her suffer through chemo and radiation just to prolong her life for a short time.

There are 3 graphic pictures of her surgery site at the very end.  I will warn you again before they come up if you don't want to see them.

She was sent home with a hard plastic cone. 

She was walking around bumping into everything and knocking stuff over.  Then she backed herself into a corner and started shaking because she was so scared.  We have to keep her from licking her sutures for 2 weeks so we knew this wasn't going to work.

So Spencer and I went to Petco and bought a soft cone.  It was more comfortable, but still ruins her peripheral vision, so it was hardly any better.

Look at this pitiful dog.

One huge problem was that Ginger can't make it through the doggy door with either cone.  So, at 11 pm Michael made a homemade "cone" out of a rolled towel, panty hose and duct tape.  By 3 am she had pulled it off.  He put it back on.  At 7 am I woke up to the sound of some vigorous licking.  I threw nail clippers at her to make her stop.  Cruel, yes, but Elliott was sleeping with me and I couldn't risk waking him up for the day.

When I got up I made another homemade "cone" out of a towel folded in thirds and duct tape.  The lady on the video did it beautifully and it worked.  Mine sucked.

I ended up just wrapping the wound site with cotton gauze and an ace bandage.  Our next solution is going to be to put a shirt on her and then wrap an ace bandage around that.

She's on some really good pain killers and doesn't seem to be in pain so we just have to make extra certain that she doesn't rip herself open.

OK.  The pictures are coming.  Stop here if you don't want to see a shaved dog belly with a 2-3 inch incision with 11 sutures.

Yuck.

Look at the dent.  The vet really cut out a lot.

Poor Ginger.