with this one …

[and her stained upper lip]

and this one …

[and her always full mouf]

and this one …

[and her growing number of gray hairs]

and this one …

[and her infected ears and nose that just cost us a boatload of money]

and this one …

[and his recently-acquired beard]

and these new floors and painted walls …

[in our master bedroom]

happy Friday, everyone!! I hope you all have a fabulous weekend. xxo

ps – GO DAWGS!!

Two posts in one day … that never happens.

See, I posted the other post thinking that it was Monday. But it’s really Tuesday, and I’m supposed to be posting my I Heart Faces entry today. And since I can’t go back and un-post it, now, you’ll just have to deal with two posts from me today. I’m sorry.

And if you actually read all of that, I’m sorry to you, too.

ANYWAY.

Here’s my entry for the weekly photo contest …

My Macey-kins gettin’ her yawn on. Or singing O Holy Night. Maybe trying out for Glee? I’m not sure which.

Do you have a clever, funny, silly, outstanding or pretty picture of your pet? Well, shoot on over to I Heart Faces and enter (before 9:00pm CST tonight).

Our four-legged girls are looking pretty old lately.

I can’t believe I got Macey when she was a mere puppy nine years ago … I was single, working as the quality assurance coordinator for a regional vending company, and living by myself in a hole-in-the-wall one-bedroom apartment.

I got her because she was a boxer / black lab mix, and I thought she’d be able to protect me.

Except for the teeny tiny fact that she would hide and pee anytime someone looked at her.

She weighs over 70lbs, she can bite a steak bone in half, and her paws are bigger than a toddler’s hands … but she’s still skittish around strangers.

Go figure.

on august break

So we’re on vacation this week. As you’re reading this, we are probably in the car. Listening to the most annoying voices ever from the backseat (die, Max & Ruby … DIE!), eating our picnic lunch WAY too early (ahem, Keli), having your adorable wife read emails and facebook posts out loud when she’d much rather be reading a book (ahem, Ken) and stopping to pee every 15 minutes (she’s 3 … I’m pregnant … your guess is as good as mine).

I’m always nervous to post that we’re away from our house in case someone decides to break in, but let me set some things straight.

a. we don’t have anything worth stealing,

b. trust me, we don’t buy expensive electronics or gadgets or artwork or jewelry,

b. if you do break in, please clean up after yourself, because the *last* thing i want to do is clean up YOUR mess when we get home.

Besides that, we are too cheap to board our dogs, so we have someone staying at our house with our two ferocious dogs.

No, seriously.

They’re, like, insanely mean. See?

No, wait.

Okay, here’s Macey in her most heightened state of awareness.

Oops, that’s not it, either.

All right … just make sure you do NOT throw a stick!

Well, unless you want her to chase it over and over again.

Okay, okay.

Whatever you do … don’t let your kids anywhere near them! There is no telling what they’ll do!!

Ugh. NEVERMIND.

While we’re away, I’ve got some scheduled posts ready to go, including one from one of the coolest chicks I know who I pretty much want to be in another life. I mean, besides the fact that we’re practically twins already.

But I thought I’d do something a little different on the blog this week …

That’s right. Anything. Shoot me some questions.

Within reason. Nothing perverted. Or weird. Or about my current weight.

You can ask about photography or camera equipment or editing programs or what I did before I had kids or sewing or how I can lick my own elbows or what I do in my spare time or exactly what I did to become so awesome. You know, the usual.

At the end of the week (probably during the 10-hour drive back home next Saturday), I’ll go through and answer them.

And please ask something. Because there’s really nothing more embarrassing than opening up the floor for questions and then hearing … *crickets*

In the meantime, watch out for these two.

They will totally rip your head off.

You know, after they roll around in some dead grass and lick themselves.

We took Emma to the zoo today … it was just too nice outside to sit inside all afternoon. I didn’t take my camera today, but I should have – I guess the weather brought all of the animals out, and they were all very active and playful.

Except for the elephants – they took them inside to clean out their cage. We told Emma they were taking a nap.

On the way home, we tried to get her to take a nap, but that girl will fight it tooth and nail when she doesn’t want to sleep … and she succeeded. Which means we are looking at a VERY cranky evening ahead of us.

After we got home, we worked a bit outside – got our fig bush and 2 blackberry bushes planted. We also have the first sprouts in our summer garden – broccoli!

Now I’m off to research: how to keep dogs from digging up all of your plants.

Sigh.

I know … lame title. Title creativity is not here today.

But we’ve got lots of snow!!

It took Emma a little while to get used to stomping around in 4+ inches of snow …

… but she was our little snow bunny in no time at all!

Of course, the dogs enjoyed it, too!

You can see more pics in my snow album on Flickr.

My desktop computer is dying.

A slow and painful death.

Yeah, the one I just moved downstairs so that I could get more work done while spending time with Emma.

I can’t even connect to the internet anymore, and since all of my photo software is on the desktop, this is the only* picture you’re going to get today.

Just getting that took a jump drive and more patience than I normally have.

What is that, you ask?

That would be the roots of my gardenia bush — one of our lovely dogs decided to have a digging party and invite the other one along. I don’t know who instigated it, but they both had dirt on their noses when I went to let them inside.

I guess that’ll teach ME to leave them outside all afternoon when it’s nice and warm, huh?

To top it all off, we took Emma to Circuit City tonight to look at computers, and par for the course whenever we’re out with Emma, she took off running away from me. Full blast as fast as she could.

Straight into a shelving unit that was sticking out into the aisle.

She now has a goose-egg on her forehead the size of Utah.

Needless to say, that was the quickest exit we’ve ever made from a store, because her pain cries are absolutely gut-wrenching. She really never cries, so when she’s in pain, she sounds like she is in a WHOLE LOT more pain that she really is. It’s like she makes up for the other times that she doesn’t cry.

So much for my good day high. I’m drowning my sorrows in a homemade root beer float and then it’s off to bed.

*I lied.

I Heart Faces has introduced a Pets theme this week, and I felt compelled to enter this picture of Jessie. They said that it would be “really cool” if we could stick with the “eyes theme,” so here we go.

When I first started dating Ken, his dog’s eyes freaked me out. She’s a black dog with light brown eyes, and she has a tendency to stare at you. It’s really unnerving. But over the years, I’ve completely fallen in love with Jessie – and her freaky brown eyes.

I really love this picture, because it’s so Jessie – happy and ready to play.

I’m organizing the downstairs area to get ready for THE BIG MOVE, so I thought today would be a good day for a post that I didn’t have to come up with.

Jen over at Our Daily Big Top tagged me (I GOT TAGGED!!! I GOT TAGGED!!) to do a pet meme, and y’all know how much I love our pets. I mean, my blog is called TWELVE PAWS (although, we only have 8 paws now, God rest Molly’s soul) — we love our pets. They sleep in our bed. They get on the furniture. We worried more about them than we did about Emma on the day we brought her home from the hospital. Clearly, this is the meme for us.

1. What is the first pet you remember?
Daisy – she was one super ugly but super sweet mutt (although I thought she was beautiful at the time) and she was scared of thunderstorms. We would find her at various neighbor’s houses, sometimes miles away, after thunderstorms. She ran away during one particular storm, and we never found her.

2. How many different kinds of pets have you owned?
LOTS!

growing up: Daisy (mutt), Keena (toy poodle), Roc (lab mix), Duchess (boxer), Maggie (boxer) and various outdoor cats

post-college: Macey (black lab/boxer mix)

with DH: 3 hermit crabs, Jessie (mutt) and Molly (German Shepherd mix)

We still have Macey and Jessie (and Molly’s ashes)

3. What was your strangest pet?
The hermit crabs. They didn’t do anything except dig into the sand for months at a time. Two of them now live happily in one of the classrooms at my mom’s school.

4. What is your dream pet?
A non-shedding, kind and gentle dog who inherently knows that there is NO BARKING ALLOWED when Emma is napping.

5. What is your nightmare pet?
I would flip if I had another Macey as a puppy. She was awful. She was like Hooch – she ate everything, she chewed on everything, she peed/pooped on everything. She tore a hole in the bathroom door when I left her in there one day. On top of that, she had been abused as a wee puppy, so she was scared of everything. Those first couple of years were painful.

6. Your best/ funniest pet story…

the picture says it all — yes, that’s me and my twin … errrr … poodle

7. Tell your worst/saddest pet story…
Anytime a pet dies, it’s just horribly sad, but I think the saddest was when we lost Keena, our toy poodle from congestive heart failure after 10 years.

8. Did you ever have a scary animal experience?
Yes, the time I found out that Macey has boxer cardiomyopathy — we were out running/walking the dogs on a very hot day, and she collapsed in someone’s yard. Ken had to carry her (all 80 lbs of her!) home so we could get her some water to cool her down.

And there’s the time she ate an entire bottle of Molly’s incontinence medication – she had to stay overnight at the emergency animal clinic for constant monitoring and IV’s.

And Molly’s last month when she had such trouble breathing — we ended up having to put her to sleep 2 days after we brought Emma home from the hospital due to throat cancer.

9. What was your favorite pet?
Overall, I think my favorite pet is Macey. I got her when I was living on my own – I had just broken off an engagement and things were rough. She completely changed my life, and even though those first few years were really hard, she has turned out to be the most loyal, gentle and loving dog.

10. What did you really want to tell us about pets that didn’t fit into the other questions?
If you’re going to get a pet, please please PLEASE adopt. There are so many animals (including purebreds that were discarded) sitting in animal shelters that are just waiting for the right home. And every year, at least half of them are euthanized.

Having said that, think long and hard – do research – pray if you’re the praying type – do whatever you need to do to make sure that having a pet is the right choice. Most of the animals in animal shelters are there because they were obtained by someone with unrealistic expectations of the time, effort, and money required to sustain a lifelong relationship with their pet. Not cool.

We are huge supporters of adopting and also working with your dogs to adapt with change. When Emma came along, we never once thought about getting rid of the dogs — we taught THEM to get used to HER.

We work with her to be nice to them, and we work with them to be gentle with her. And now, they’re inseperable – she’s usually calling for the dogs first thing in the morning instead of calling for us. Macey is a boxer mix that can bite through a turkey bone in one fell swoop — but Emma can take food out of Macey’s bowl while she’s eating. It takes work, but it’s doable!

So that’s my PSA for the day. Adopt!

I really need to get to work, and Emma just climbed upstairs by herself, so I’m tagging anyone who wants to do it!