Memorial Day Weekend 2009

We spent the weekend up at the lake.  We (or maybe it is more honest to say, I, Sandy) were a little unsure about how the weekend was going to go with all of us sleeping in an 8 x 12 foot cabin.  It was fine until the last night when Anders suddenly decided that he wanted to hang out with us rather than sleep - even when we really wanted to sleep.  The weather was great and the bugs were nonexistent and we only saw one tick, which was thankfully on Will and not me.  The birds were fabulous - lots of warblers that we never get to see when the leaves are completely out.  Here are tons of pictures.  

First the sleeping arrangements.  Anders was at one end of the cabin and were at the other end.

This also served as a good play area when needed.  Note his cool jean jacket. 

We covered the crib with a sheet so that we wouldn't disturb him for the two + hours we were up after he went to bed.  This is how it looked when he woke up from a nap or the night.  

Diaper changes have gotten a little challenging at times as there are so many exciting things to check out.  Plus, being naked is just too much fun. 

Will and Anders took a nap.   Such a cute face!

We went for a hike and discovered an ATV trail that either our neighbors or the DNR have made in the National Forest.  It would make a pretty good XC Ski trail.  Anders LOVES this pack, which we bought for really cheap at the REI scratch and dent sale (members only - it pays to be a member, and no, I don't work for REI now).  It might have been our best purchase ever.  

Will caught us a Lake Trout for dinner one night.  It was tasty.  

Oh, we forgot the booster seat that we use as a high chair.  Dang it!  So this is how I fed Anders.  It worked quite well, actually, except that it was a bit messy and he had a tendency to slouch a bit.  

Ok, we took Anders out for his first ride in canoe and he HATED it.  Not good.  I cannot remember for sure whether or not he had napped well before this, but we were pretty sure that the biggest issue was the life vest.  The only way he was even sort of calm, was if I held him like this.  Also, Will wiped his nose at one point and it made Anders stamp his foot (while standing in the canoe), which was quite hilarious.   Anyway, we will try again in July. 

One of the warblers we saw as a Northern Parula.  

We went back to the mystery trail for a second hike so that we could record the location of the trail on the GPS to get an idea of where it is in relation to our property line.  Anders (or maybe it was Will) forgot his hat at the Montessori and he (Anders) hates wearing hats, so we went for a combination of sunscreen and bandanna.  He only took the bandanna off once in the couple of hours we were out.  Plus he looked cool.

After the hike, Anders and I hung out on the deck while Will picked up rocks for his wall.  Anders did some standing and then we hung out in the hammock and watched a Red Squirrel eat bird seed.  The squirrel really caught Anders' attention and she was not concerned about us at all (lucky for her Lucy wasn't there).  Lucy actually was there in spirit and she had left lots of hair behind for us to remember her by.   

Will found this Blue Spotted Salamander under a rock.  It was very cool and I feel like I just read something about them being kind of rare, but maybe I am thinking of something else.  

Like father, like son.  I love how they have the same look on their faces!  They are sitting about 6 feet away from the bird feeder which was covered in Pine Siskins and the Red Squirrel.  Again, Anders was enthralled - yeah!  

Happy boy - loves eating.  In this particular picture he is enjoying some cheddar cheese.  At one point I realized that he had at least two pieces in this mouth - oops. 

 

I don't know what it is, but Anders has this uncanny ability to sense when when I am just sitting down to relax and he wakes up from his naps!  So, here he is hanging out at the rock wall construction project while I relax a bit.  Have I mentioned that the kid loves to stand?  

All in all, it was a great trip.   We cannot go up in June at all due to all the stuff we have going on so our next trip will be in July.  The one room cabin is kind of tricky, but worked out ok.  I'm sure we are all happy to be back home though - mainly to be back in our comfy beds.  

Yard Work

After everyone left on Sunday (see Betsy's and Bill's blogs for some pictures from the weekend) we did some yard work.  Anders helped with the new Honeycrisp Apple tree we bought to replace our second Redbud in 2 years.  For some reason, even though they are bred for Minnesota winters, we cannot get Redbuds to survive in our yard.  Since Anders loves applesauce and Honeycrisp apples are so good, and a Minnesota apple (developed at the U of M) we went for it.  We also expanded our garden - this is part of my evil plan to have a garden take over our entire yard!

Anders loves to stand.  In fact, he crawls over to things specifically to stand up.  Yep, he is crawling.  It really has developed in the last few days - hopefully Will can put some videos on the blog in the next week.  Anyway, standing is his favorite thing these days.  This same afternoon when I went to get him from his nap, he was standing up in his crib chatting with the fish.

He is also very curious.  On Tuesday Will told me that he had a disconcerting moment - he put Anders down in the living room and went to the kitchen, when he looked out of the kitchen a minute or two later, Anders was nowhere in sight.  It turned out that he had crawled about 5 feet to a bag of stuff and was checking out the cool running shoes I had recently bought at the Title 9 Blow Out Sale in St. Paul a few days earlier.  

That is the end result of all of Will's hard work.  We expanded the garden - making it twice the size, added some more hostas and moved a day lily which was large enough to be split.  We might also need another boulder, but I'm not sure we want to put it in Will's car while we are up at the lake. 

 

The parting shot: Anders LOVES Steven Colbert. I should send this to the Colbert Report maybe...

Memories

Lucy died 2 weeks ago tonight.  Despite dealing with her cancer for the last 8 months, her death that Monday night was a big shock.  Will had been out of town so I was on my own for taking and picking Anders up from the Montessori and I remember thinking on my way home that I hoped Lucy would have moved from where she was when I left for work in the morning.  Well she hadn't moved and she gave me a bit of a scare by just laying there for minute staring at me.  Thankfully she was alive and after a minute she got up and went exploring around the front and back yards looking for new signs of spring.  She was even perky that evening when Will was making dinner.  Then around 9 pm I heard a noise that sounded like she had flopped down on the floor (she was a flopper) but when I went out into the dining room a few minutes later, it was apparent that she had collapsed.  We moved her into our bedroom to the spot next to the bed where she always slept and she died around 11 pm.   The whole thing was good and bad all wrapped up in one package.  Good because she died at home with us there and not stressed out at the vet's, good because it happened naturally, bad because...well, she died.  Anyway, here are some memories of our time with Lucy.  They aren't in any particular order because this program is a complete nightmare when it comes to loading and rearranging pictures and I just don't have the time or energy to try to figure out exactly how I should load the pictures so they are in chronological order.

Lucy was the most tolerant dog - at least with me and Will.  She actually went for a bike ride with us in this Burley my friend Chris gave us.  She didn't like it, but she went anyway - I think because she was so loyal and it was way better to be with us, even on a bike ride than to be without us.  She did jump out and scrape her chin on this ride, though.

Again, more tolerance.  She would pretty much do anything Will told her to do.  In this picture she is modeling our new kitchen cupboard.  Actually, this is now drawers - Will made them.

Here she is back in October 2008 very shortly after her surgery to remove the Mast Cell Tumors that I'm pretty sure did her in.  I know she was old - some thing between 14 and 15 - Rob when did you move to SLC?  But she was a healthy dog until she got cancer.  

This is back in March moments before Anders and I left for the airport to go to Colorado for a week.  I wasn't sure Lucy was going to be around when I got back.  This was the first time she was at all demonstrative with Anders.  

Ok, these next several pictures and the one above bring up a lot of emotions for me.  Lucy was the best running partner I ever had (sorry to anyone that I've run with that is reading this - it is hard to measure up to someone who runs with pure joy, though).  When we first moved into our house I wasn't running much, but then in the middle of winter I started getting up with her and taking her for walks in the snow.  She was so excited to be out that she would run like crazy and I would have to run to keep up with her.  It was so fun running at 5 am with her - the world was so quiet and I could have her off the leash with no worries about other people or cars.  She got me back into running and in the best shape I've ever been in.  She used to run up to 12 miles with me.  We would take a break at a lake or two so she could cool off and take a drink.  When she slowed down, I started running shorter runs and consequently wasn't in as good of shape as I was when she was at her peak.  I mourned the loss of her as a running partner a few years ago, but the memories of some of her antics on our runs have been coming back to me lately as I run past some of her favorite spots or people with dogs. That last picture is post-baby.

We ran in the winter and got covered in frost.  She had to wear flashing red lights so that I could see where she was in the dark. 

After every run I make a smoothie for breakfast and Lucy would wait (sometimes not very patiently) to lick out the glass when I was done.  She loved smoothies.  Now I have to rinse the left over smoothie out of the glass on my own.  

When I said she would do pretty much anything Will wanted her to do, here is an example of something she really did NOT want to do.  This is November at the lake.  The ice is very thin and she wasn't having any of it.  To me, her look says "No Way!"  I think Will might have put her on the ice anyway and if I recall correctly, she carefully and loyally followed him around.

This was her favorite spot in the kitchen, well I take that back, her favorite spot in the kitchen was at the feet of the person doing the cooking.  Or right behind you in prime tripping position - you know, with the hope that you might lose your balance and drop something tasty.  She was frequently told to not be underfoot and this is where she would go - not quite out of the room - even when there was obviously no cooking going on.  

This is the scene I happened upon one night. 

This is an incredibly cooperative moment for Lucy and Josie.  They both thought of themselves as the alpha dog, which sometimes led to some tense moments, but here they are keeping the chipmunks at bay up at Bill and Kathie's place in Wisconsin.  Lucy loved to chase squirrels and other rodents.  She actually caught a couple of mice and it appeared that she licked them to death - I had the misfortune of stepping on one with my bare foot.   We have several pictures of her sitting intently like this for hours in various places.  It turns out that this can be very exhausting.

Here we are up at the lake.  I'm not 100% sure what Lucy is doing here, but it looks like she is poking Will in the leg.  Poking us to get us somewhere or to get something was another one of her things.  It could be totally annoying, but I find now that those annoying things are something I really miss.  Another thing that was very pesky was that she always slept on my side of the bed right where my feet would land on the floor as I would get out of bed.  We both got very good at stepping around her in the dark.  I definitely miss having her there now. 

Lucy loved to stand up in boats.  She was in canoes more than motor boats, but this was a very typical position for her.  In a canoe, she was known to get all 4 feet up on the gunwhales as she watched the water in front of us.  It was crazy.  

Lucy loved the woods.  She loved to explore.  She chased all sorts of stuff from deer, to squirrels to random leaves blowing.  It was always kind of crazy to watch her take off after something - rabbits and deer got her barking this crazy, frenzied yip as she disappeared after them.  Thankfully she always came back. 

She hated swimming, but she liked to cool off - sometimes in some pretty frigid water.  This is up in northern Minnesota in May - that water was freezing. 

She was not supposed to get on the bed, but as she got older, she quit asking for permission. 

She hated these boots, but they allowed her to get into the lake in the winter.  She maybe would have been ok not going then, but we were going so so was she.

This is at Jean's house.  Lucy wanted everyone to know that she had nothing to do with this.  She also had nothing to do with all the food that mysteriously was taken down from our counter tops and eaten in our living room.  Nor did she know who took the trash out of the bathroom waste basket piece by piece to get to the gum that somebody tossed in there.  

Lucy came to our wedding. 

She also went on several canoe trips with us.

I had to post this one because we all look so funny.  

This is a really long post and I think I could go on all night, but I need to go to bed.  We are definitely missing Lucy.  It is really hard to believe that it has been 2 weeks already.  We are lucky that we have Anders here to distract us.  She has definitely left a pretty huge void in our lives.  Thanks to everyone for helping us to give Lucy a good life and for all your kind words these last 2 weeks.