Like Father, Like Son

Lord of the Dance (warning, may contain occasional nudity)

OK, just ignore the audio and get the Riverdance music going good in your head before you hit play.

Little drummer boy

5 months old today.

Anders says "Clara, do like this.  It's fun!"

Will says "I challenge you to watch/listen to this without wanting to clear your throat."

No Way, Jose!

Despite the fresh air and lack of a nap yesterday afternoon, no, Anders did not sleep all night long.  Starting sometime in the 1 am hour, he woke up every 1-2 hours.  Good thing he is so cute! 

Heat Wave

The temperature climbed above 30 degrees today, so we decided to take in the events at the Minneapolis Loppet (the main event of the Loppet is a cross country ski race).  Anders got to try out the backpack we bought while visiting Pete, Betsy, Henry and Clara in Chicago this summer.  He LOVED it!  It might be our best purchase ever.  

The main thing we went to see was the skijoring event - which is skiing with a dog or two pulling you.  I wish we had done this with Lucy years ago - she would have loved it.  There were tons of people out - again, it was a heat wave as this was our first day over freezing in 2009.  These dogs seemed to know what they were doing.

This could be Anders in about 10 years.  No pressure. 

Some of the dogs didn't know what they were doing and were just out to have fun.  I was surprised at how many people there were skijoring. 

I think this dog's name was Elroy, but it might have been Harvey.   Regardless, he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing and a minute after this picture was taken, his owner came skiing up bellowing the dog's name, which Will and I cannot remember exactly.  It was quite funny.

Elroy/Harvey wasn't really cooperating at all - he really just wanted to play.

Minnesotans don't wear coats when the temperature gets to 30.  But they do make igloos.

Cute, cute, cute!  Anders talked and squealed and kicked Will the whole time.  When I was changing his diaper tonight I told him that if he slept all night, we would go on hour long walks in the backpack every day.  This made him crack up - seriously, and I'm not really sure why.  He might of been delirious from the warm temperature and possibly overwhelmed with sleepiness.

There was also a bike race.  The riders had studded tires and rode around the track for 30 minutes.  The track is on one of the lakes in Minneapolis - the skijoring was on a lake too. 

This is my cool shot of the riders in the Spiral of Death.  

Here is some of the ice we were walking on.  I should have taken a picture of one of the cracks so you could see how thick the ice was - I think it was about 2 feet thick.  These are just air bubbles and looked a lot cooler in person.

This is another Minnesota past time - I don't know what it is called - ski-sailing?  Para-boarding?  Anyway, there were about 10 people doing it on Lake Calhoun - the person on the far right of the picture is attached to the sail.   There was also somebody out on the lake with a wind-surfer - wind-skiing?  My picture of that was worse than these are. 

More cuteness.  

Meanwhile, 35 years later...

Words of wisdom

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Hooray!

Bummer

Will recently noticed that Lucy had a couple of new lumps along the incision from her surgery in October to remove her Mast Cell Tumor.  So we went back to the U of M oncology dept on Thursday and sure enough, her cancer is back with a vengeance.  In October they got good margins when they removed the tumor, meaning they removed the whole tumor plus some tissue to help make sure they  got everything, but MCTs are tricky.  Mast cells are actually part of the immune system, but MCTs are mast cells gone bad.  Because they are part of the immune system, the tumors can spread to other parts of the body without being attached to the obvious tumors - the oncologist called them satellite tumors.  So anyway, Lucy has 6-7 more tumors on her hip and they are behaving very aggressively - meaning they are growing very fast.  The vets actually seemed a bit shocked at how aggressive the tumors are.  We don't know if the tumors have spread to her internal organs, but we aren't going to do the invasive testing to find out either.  Surgery is not an option as they barely had room on her hip to get the original tumor out, so after carefully considering all of our options for treatment we are going to use drugs to make her comfortable.   Basically Lucy is going on hospice care I guess. Lucy seems to be doing fine - she is very perky and in fact, driving us crazy with multiple trips outside, which we discovered was to eat the suet bits the birds have left on the ground.  She gets very animated as she does what I call the Suet Dance, which if it wasn't happening every 5 minutes, would be quite entertaining.  

This picture is one of my favorites - it is taken at the lake on a cliff we have on the property.  We were down at the bottom of the cliff and she had found her way up on top of it.  She didn't seem to care that that stick was getting her.  

Because we don't know if she has any internal tumors, we don't know how long she will live.  They recently lost a patient at the U that had some MCTs and had been on the same drug treatment for a year.  So who knows.