Our Christmas season is off to a great start: many of the same traditions, and oh how I look forward to them:
- Take the items down from the attic.
- Go to the farmers market and get a tree.
- Take the tree in, set it up.
- Play Christmas Music. Go heavy on the carols we sing at church.
- Deck the halls with our hodgepodge ornaments. No, we dont follow a theme- just special ornaments and hand-me-downs from over the years.
- Alternate which child puts the start on the tree. This was Rosies year.
- Clean up. Of course, the least-exciting part of it.
Here is a clip of us getting a tree in 2021, 2022, and again in the same place this year:
Fast forward a weekend,and Rosie has a birthday. This year was not nearly as exciting as last year’s milestone birthday (we prepped her well ahead of time), but taking all of your friends to see the new Wicked movie is pretty sweet too.
She had 11 friends over (I think?). Yes, a blast. Yes, kindof my worst nightmare? Although now that they are around 11 years old, its not as bad- they are all good kids. We had Jimmy Johns at our house before the movie, then Taylor made special zip-loc bags of candy for the kids to have during the movie, so we dont have to buy stuff there. Genius.
Fast forward another day, and Taylor is off to Fort Lauderdale (Not Miami) for a work conference for 4 days, so in typical dad fashion, look for some last minute ideas of what to do with the kiddos while mom is gone: A day trip to the mountains for tubing? Winter festivities downtown? Anything in Raleigh or Charlotte for the day (the more time it takes the better?).
Instead, we got some last-minute tickets to Disney on Ice. They are pretty cheap the day of the event.
We really had fun- Mercy was really into it. And, since we went ice-skating the week before downtown, it gave us insight to how challenging all of those tricks are while ice skating.
Afterwards, I learned that Mercy was expecting to go ice skating with all of the Disney princesses too.
Fast forward another weekend, when I am ready to relax, and at about 11:30 am, Taylor says to me: “I think Hazy ate all the raisins“.
When she says “all the raisins”, she means the family size, 20oz container, not a typical red-box of individual servings a kid might eat.
If wondering why this is important or blog worthy, here is an article about it. In short, raisins are highly toxic for dogs. And its not just this link, all articles about the topic say to rush to the vet ASAP. If you didnt know, now you know.
So I drove fast- very, very fast to the after-hours vet. When explaining that my kid was doing a tea-party in her room and the dog ate the family size container of raisins, their collective faces dropped. This didnt help the situation- I said goodbye to Stormy earlier in the year, and didnt want to say goodbye to another. Plus, I couldnt have this on Mercy’s conscience: that her little snack caused the dog to get ill, or worse.
The vet gave her some stuff to induce vomiting, found “a ton of raisins” mixed in, took my money, and sent us home.
The challenge with raisins in dogs is that they dont really know for sure: weight and size vs. quantity dont really matter. Sometimes two or three can mess up even a large dog, sometimes it takes many, many to have an impact. But if it does, by the time the dog starts showing symptoms 24-48 hours after ingestion, the kidneys are already failing.
The vet told us to come back Sunday morning to do a follow-up to check kidney functioning with some more bloodwork. It all came out well, and she was back home with her tail wagging, never having skipped a beat. She is acting a little strange this morning as I type (48 hours after), but Im sure its nothing, right?
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