When I came home today, I was greeted by this cute little face:

My sister had been visiting our local Humane Society in search for a puppy. I knew that she had been looking at a certain one in particular, but I wasn’t expecting her to get one so soon. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be able to blame her either for not turning down this adorable ball of fur. She is a doxin/beagle mix and she just falls all over herself. :*

Tabor (my four year old golden retriever mix) doesn’t really know how to react to her. At first he stayed away from her, but I can tell that he’s getting annoyed and irritated by her. Macy just wants to play and Tabor just wants her to leave him alone.

Macy will just chase Tabor around the living room. They’ll get used to each other eventually, but I can’t help but feel a little bad for Tabor because she does like to nip at his tail and feet, and jump on him as well.

She’s not trained so my sister will have to train her and we’ll all have to chip in to take care of her because my sister does work a lot. It’s so fun to just sit and watch her. When Steven came home from school, we both just stayed in the living room for at least an hour just playing with her. She’s just adorable! Because she’s so little, she keep’s taking Tabor’s toys and dragging them underneath the chair. Tabor can’t get them back either since he’s too big to crawl underneath. Poor dog.

Just like Tabor, Macy comes running whenever my mom starts to prepare dinner and she hears the crinkling of ingredients and the smell of the different foods. As my brother says, now my mom will have two friends to help her cook dinner.

My mom is not the biggest dog lover, so she wasn’t exactly keen on my sister getting a puppy, but I think she’s relying on the fact that my sister plans on moving out soon. My mom made it quite clear that she’s not picking up any of her messes either. Though, she can’t help deny that Macy is cute. Tabor was definitely cuter as a puppy, but Macy is still cute. :love:

It was hard to take some decent pictures of her because she just jumps around and waddles away before I can snap one of her. I didn’t want to use the flash either because I don’t want to hurt her eyes! I managed to snag a few good ones though.

I’m sure that it will be an interesting next couple of weeks – or however much longer we’ll be keeping her – as she teethes and gets into everything like all puppies do. But welcome to the family, Macy. =)

Wednesday after school, I walked into the house and the first thing that my mom said to me was, “Sit down, I have something to tell you.” When someone says those words to you, you can only think the worst. Who had died? What horrible accident had happened. Who has cancer?

She then said to me, “Dad has a tumor.”

I immediately asked where and she told me that it was a couple inches above his rectum and it was pushing through the tissue wall and into his muscle. My dad had had a routine colonoscopy and, from that, they had found a tumor in between his rectum and his sigmoid colon; or generally speaking, in his large intestine. I had to do a bit of research, so for those a little medically stupid like me, a picture:

http://www.medicinenet.com/colon_cancer/article.htm#2whatis

He’s had to go back to the hospital multiple times since then to get other tests done. At first they weren’t sure if it was cancerous or not, but the next day the surgeon said he would be really surprised if it was not. To treat it, he’ll have to undergo five weeks of radiation and chemo to shrink it, and then have his first surgery, where they will remove the tumor. He’ll have a colostomy for 5-7 weeks, and after everything has healed, will go in for another surgery to rebuild his bowels.

We still don’t know a lot of details, but that’s the general idea of what’s going to happen. They said the tumor is about the size of a golf ball and they were really surprised that he wasn’t having any symptoms from it, like rectal bleeding, weight loss, or cramps. My dad kind of laughed and said, “What! I’ve gained weight!”

I’m glad my dad can laugh about it. Though as he said, “There’s not much else you can do.” He’s been making all sorts of “butt” jokes since then. ;P He’s so weird.

It was a bit of a blessing that my dad went in to get his colonoscopy when he did. He was originally supposed to go in a couple of years ago, but the doctors said that if he had done that, they probably wouldn’t have found the tumor.

I think my mom is taking it the hardest of us all. While colon cancer is definitely very serious, it’s not usually deathly or have awful side affects that will affect anyone for the rest of their life. It’s just one of those things that really shake you. It was so sudden to. You just never know when things are going to change…

We don’t know when he’ll have to start radiation and chemo, but probably some time next week. They want to start pretty soon, which would be best. It seems like a silly question in retrospect, but I wanted to know if he’ll lose his hair.

It’s been kind of a long, sucky week…