Please follow the link below for recent pictures of the gals. As you may remember, my formerly good friends at Kodak shut down their website sharing feature in July, effectively ruining my life - and that is only slightly being dramatic. Shutterfly acquired the site, and their picture sharing is nowhere near as user-friendly as Kodak's, so I am still reeling a bit from this forced transition. Long story short, if you follow this link you will find a recent album titled July-August 2012 and if you click the right button it will magically transform into a slideshow of 72 pictures from our recent summer adventures.
I believe we last left off at Disney World, so let me get you up to speed from that point forward:
In July, Hannah and I took a weekend road trip to visit our respective BFFs in Chicagoland. My BFF, one Rebecca Couri, has a little girl, Gabby, who is just a month older than Hannah. As such, they have been declared to be best friends since birth. The arrangement seems to be working out well - they had a great time playing together over the weekend, and they are perhaps the cutest couple of best friends this world has ever known...well, second only to their Momma's of course. ;) We also had the opportunity to [finally] meet Sam, Becky's baby boy who went and turned 8 months old before I had the chance to get down there. He is about as stinking cute as cute gets. We had a lovely visit and Hannah enjoyed being Mom's only child for the entire weekend immensely.
August brought Megan's last few weeks of daycare. (I have shortened my schedule at work to allow me to pick her up and drop her off at the bus stop every day, so she has no daycare requirement now). It was pretty hard to say goodbye to her preschool friends (these girls have been friends since before they were 2 years old!), but they were all off to different kindergartens in the fall, so even if she stayed at the same daycare before/after school, things just weren't going to be the same. She had a tough couple of weeks but came fully out of her funk to enjoy Family Camp at the end of the month. This has been one of her favorite annual events for three years running now. She had a great time, and spent the entire week (Sunday - Sunday) with Grandma and Grandpa Purdy in Pentwater. She did, begrudgingly, grace us with her presence one day during the week to go to her kindergarten orientation to meet her teacher, but she was straight back to camp afterwards. Hannah joined them as well from Wednesday - Sunday. She was also quite the camper, and we look forward to next year when she can get even more involved with the kid's activities and games - she's still a bit young for some of it, though she never fails to entertain herself with just a pile of dirt, so it's not like she was unable to enjoy herself. :) Kyle headed up for the weekend, while Mom stayed home with an ailing beagle (details below).
Megan is now officially a kindergartner! She thinks it's like the best thing that has ever happened to her. It has been so awesome to watch her adjust to this new stage of her life. She is excited every day about school, and she thinks she is B.I.G. S.T.U.F.F. because she goes to kindergarten. I can't think of an adequate word to describe it - it's like one level below arrogance, where she is quite confident without being offensive or obnoxious...well borderline obnoxious for sure, but still charming about it. It's hilarious. In just a week, she is reading with more confidence, has a new "best friend", and is very close to having the rest of her social circle nailed down. We love our new morning routine - she gets a bit more time to wake up in the morning, eating her breakfast while tuned into PBS. In the afternoon she gets an extra hour and a half at home to play with neighbor friends or play board games with Mom (she is currently obsessed with Mancala, Sorry and Life - all of which are quite fun for me too). The whole thing is working out great. I was kind of dreading this whole kindergarten thing all along, despite everyone's warnings that I need not worry about Megan. As is my lot in life after giving birth to her, I worried about Megan. And, as it turns out, I did not need to worry about Megan. Megan is nailing kindergarten. :)
Hannah is also doing quite well. She seemed to adapt to big sister's absence on the ride to and from daycare pretty quickly. She enjoys the one on one time with Mom & Dad, I think. Verbally I can't quite keep up with her developments - she can just kind of say everything now. We have videos of her from the winter where it was one or two words at a time, and now she talks in full paragraphs. It still takes me by surprise when I hear some of the stories come out of her mouth - it just seemed to come together so suddenly. She remains quite a monkey, climbing up into our treehouse, hanging from the rings or bars at the playground, and engaging in otherwise generally unsafe behaviors without caution. We tried (and failed) a potty training push in the middle of August, but she just doesn't seem quite ready. We probably could have pushed a little harder and gotten her there, but that seemed like it would just make things harder on us than her, so we elected to give it a break and try again next month. She is switching daycares next week (she will still be at an Appletree, and actually with the same teacher she has now, but they are building a location closer to our house so we are taking advantage of that), and will have a bit of a transition ahead of her, so we'll likely wait until she's all settled in before giving it another go. She is a mini-comic genius and a future class clown for sure - making us laugh all the time.
Lacey has actually had quite the eventful summer as well. I had been running with her earlier in the summer when she seemed to hurt her back (this has happened before). We stopped running together and she seemed to recover from her injury. A couple of weeks ago, however, something happened that set her back again, only this time way worse. We spent three days (and a lot of money) trying a steroid/laser therapy treatment with our local vet, but unfortunately it didn't seem to help at all and she spent all of Labor Day weekend in an incredible amount of pain. He referred us to MSU, and luckily they were able to get her in the next day to be seen. I took her last Wednesday for her exam, and they ended up admitting her right away to get her started on an IV narcotic and steroid to help control her pain before doing an MRI and possibly surgery the next day. Sure enough, the MRI confirmed that she had herniated a disc in her neck and had significant degeneration in another. Her surgery was later that day, but did not go as well as the doctor had hoped. While he suspected he was able to extract the herniated disc material, Lacey bled a lot during the surgery and he wasn't able to keep the surgical field clear enough to see as well as he would have liked. She recovered well, but they kept her an extra three days to evaluate her behavior and make sure he wouldn't need to go back in and try surgery again. Several days, and even more money later, we brought her home - just yesterday, actually. She is doing AWESOME! She looks like a new dog, and is already doing things that I haven't really seen her do in months. We're not sure how long exactly this disc had been bothering her, but she looks amazing. Unfortunately for her, she still has a long recovery ahead of her, and needs to be on strict crate rest for the next three weeks, followed by another four weeks of gradual increases in her activity. This is not going over very well, as it is difficult to explain the need for a spine to heal after surgery to a beagle. It will be a long few weeks, but we are very thankful for the chance at many more years with our healthy bea-girl. :)
