It's been a bad blogging year

I've been meaning to get back to the blog for some time, but for some reason I just don't feel like talking too much these days. Several months have gone by with no posting, but a lot has been happening...

Eleanor became a 5 year old girl. :)

We discovered that same week that we are expecting a number 5 Jacobs baby. (Preemptive answers to the standard questions are...no, we aren't trying for a boy, no, we don't know if it's a boy or girl, and no one was more surprised about the baby than we were.)

The garden started out great, but suffered severe neglect when I began to experience the 24 hour a day nausea that has been my new friend for the past 6 months. I am anxious to start again this spring.

Tony became a licensed architect (way to go Tony!) and has managed to at least stay employed through layoffs and pay cuts at his office... we are very thankful for his job.

We said goodbye to Maggie the bear dog finally, it was a very sad time, and we still miss her daily.

Our lovely easter eggers began laying lovely blue eggs, before all of the chickens started molting for the season and stopped laying. We're really missing the backyard eggs!

The shrinking income and uncertain economic future would have us down, but we still have these:





And someone gave us this:



I will post more about that later. ;)
And then there's always Christmas around the corner



Life is good.

Thursday Update, Maggie Update

Today it was unseasonably warm, and the girls played outside a bit. I took some pictures of them on the swings and captured Maggie the dog-bear doing pretty much the only thing she does these days that isn't sleeping or eating, which is barking at the girls while they swing.

This is the primary reason why we aren't able to put her to sleep, even though she stumbles all of the time, she can't hear, she increasingly can't see, and she seems to be in a fair amount of pain from her arthritis. She is a border collie which means that when she was younger she would chase pretty much anything that moved, including the broom and vacuum cleaner, any shovels, the water spray from the hose, cars, balls, frisbees, and of course the kids. Now that she doesn't get around so much (she's 15 years old now) she can't really do any of those things, but she still gets up and goes to the door anytime she's awake enough to notice the kids going out and goes out to bark at them (I think because she can't chase them).

I believe that as long as she feels up to the job of barking at the kids we'll keep trying to make her comfortable and postpone the inevitable. We really do enjoy having her around, even with all of her issues.







I should also add that since Maggie is an honorary chicken, the chickens are going to miss her greatly when she's gone!

The Dog-Bear

Ellie and I went for a walk to the playground yesterday and brought Maggie along. A dad with his little girl came along to play and the little girl (about 5) said "Daddy look, that lady has a pet bear!"