Happy Birthday to the Bossy Little Dog!

Murphy is THIRTEEN today! 

Dude. You're OLD!  And I'm so thrilled to see this milestone birthday, because this is approximately four years into living with lymphangiectasia.  I still remember reading the report from the pathologist after his surgery.  The words "Prognosis: Poor." It was a gut punch.

Management of his condition has become routine (and so have rather more frequent vet visits, and the occasional serious carpet cleaning session when his innards get out of whack).  He's back on steroids at the moment, but I'll start stepping him down from the dosage in a week.  I'll spare you the graphic details of what "innards out of whack" looks like, but I know it when I see it.  I've become quite the Dr. Mom. 

He's nearly toothless and barely hanging in at 6 pounds, which is within normal weight range for a Yorkie, but is light for him.  His healthy adult weight was around 7 to 7.5, though at one point he'd porked out all the way up to 9 lbs.  You can feel the little knobs of his spine now, but he's bright and feisty, happy and full of life, and still totally the Bossy Little Dog.  When I stop yelling at him, I'll worry.

This week is also the 10th birthday of Bossy Little Dogs.  Gee, remember when this was Bossy Little DOG, and had started out as a knitting blog?  Me neither.

This was a Granddaughter Weekend.  Dinner with Miss D last night, an hour on Skype with Supergirl this afternoon.  

Miss D loves her fruits and vegetables, but thought my first attempt at falafel was a dud.  Her mom liked it, but we both agreed that a little more frying was needed. These were healthy non-fried falafel, and I readily agree that there are times a little more oil lends a lot of value.  I will aim for a compromise between just barely misting them with oil and full immersion, but more oil is a good thing when it comes to falafel.  I didn't achieve the desired level of crispy with so little oil.  Otherwise, Dreena Burton's recipe is FABulously delicious and quite easy, and I'm definitely buying her new book.

Miss D was unimpressed, or maybe just on a non-eating day.  She maintains her trim physique by eating only every other day, when she eats like a linebacker, and remaining in constant motion at all times.  IOW,  she's a toddler.  Tonight her daddy wanted to order pizza, and she echoed, "Peeba!"  Mom texted me a picture of her chowing down on her slice.

Yes, her bangs need trimming. But they come in handy for hiding her head injuries.  Yesterday she took a header off the couch onto the tile floor, and hit so hard her mom was scared she'd actually busted her skull. It raised a hell of an impressive lump.

Mom was concerned enough to take her to the walk-in clinic, where a very nice nurse asked a few questions, examined the injury, and said she was fine.  The nurse has three boys and they did this all the time. That dramatic color faded by dinner Saturday night, with just a little residual bruising.  By the time I saw her it was nothing like this photo and was nearly gone. 

Bangs. She'll be wearing them until she's five, at least.

I'm laughing about it now, because she is SO her mother's daughter. My daughter ran head first into everything at this age, and our pediatrician, the same Dr. C who takes care of Miss D, once joked that if they ever took an x-ray of my kid's skull they'd arrest me for child abuse.  He would be my first defense witness. He saw her after so many of these encounters.  She ran into walls, she ran into the door at the bank as I was opening it, she dove headfirst into a metal crawling tunnel (it was the 80s, they are probably illegal now) at preschool, misjudged the angle, and put an impressive crease in her forehead.  But of course now I'm a grandma and a couple of decades removed from the sangfroid I'd developed when she was young, so I was glad a nurse looked her over.  I didn't want my daughter to rely on my opinion.  

There will be more of these bruises, I'm sure.  And I do love this picture and the look on both faces. She is my daughter's Mini-Me. The mother's curse, "Someday you'll have a child just like you!" has come true, and they are both fabulous.  

Today I had a nice long Skype chat with my son and Supergirl.  We are not sure whose internet connection sucks, but it was a bit slow at times.  Still, Supergirl showed me the new dinosaurs she got for her birthday, and told me their names (she lost me after triceratops and velociraptor) and which ones were carnivores and which ones ate plants.  It was like having a three year old Shirley Temple teaching your science class.  

My son told me about how she and her mom got into a debate about the eyesight of the T. Rex.  Her mom, like me, learned everything we know about dinosaurs from watching Jurassic Park, so we both thought they had poor eyesight. (Remember how in the movie, if you didn't move, he didn't see you? Apparently that was artistic license.)  

Supergirl found the episode of Dinosaur Train that corrected this misconception.  Apparently, in the BOOK Jurassic Park, it was explained that the dinosaur DNA had been mixed with frog DNA to reconstitute, or whatever it is they did, to them, and that left them with poorer eyesight than they had originally, but that part was left out of the movie.  This left millions of people like me and her mom, who got all we know about dinosaurs from Steven Spielberg, with egg on our faces. Her mom was politely schooled on this issue.  Me too.  I now officially know less about dinosaurs than my three year old granddaughter.  I blame Spielberg.

We also had a wicked bad storm rip through that has dropped our temps to delightfully, unseasonably cool.  I'm very good with putting off summer as long as we can.