Thursday 2 October 2008

Feeling fed up? Read this..

This story has to cheer anyone up, if a little childish!

Planet Airedale

So Mishka doesn't feel left out, we've joined the Planet Airedale website. It has a good forum for swapping stories, ideas, photos etc with other airedale owners, and when I posted this photo

up there in the "Hello, I'm New" forum, we received many compliments on it, and have been encouraged to submit it for potential publication in the Planet Airedale 2009 calendar. So I'll send that one (and a few others) in and see if the little fella becomes Mr September or whatever!
We'll also hope to find him other local airedales to play with, as he doesn't get the chance to socialise much with other dogs, and maybe we'll find him a girlfriend... if I am enjoying being a father, I'm sure he will too!

Lara Finds First Gear

Yep, Lara can now definitely crawl forwards. She'd mastered reversing some weeks ago, but had been reluctant to move into first gear. She has taken a healthy interest in the contents of the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers in the nursery, and after her bath each night this week she has made a charge for it on all fours. She's only going a couple of feet at the moment, but it does mean it's time to buy another baby-gate for the doorway of the nursery!

Tuesday 30 September 2008

Quick Lara Update

Olga took Lara to be weighed today, and as we suspected, she's actually lost 2 ounces in the last 4 weeks, putting her down to just above the 25th percentile. Still no alarms bells going off with the Health Visitor, well, not loudly anyway. If she drops below the 25th percentile line then we'll need to take some restorative action. Given that she's been ill for 3 of the last 4 weeks, we're not surprised that she's lost some weight, so we think the best thing to try now is giving her more of Mum's milk as well as her usual jar & fresh food, as she used to be a little fatty on the 75th percentile when she was on a 100% milk diet. We'd only plan to do this for as long as it takes to get her weight back up so we don't spoil the weaning process too much.
She was quite perky last night before bed, with only a little bit of a runny nose and not much coughing, but after sleeping well till nearly 3am she had a coughing fit and woke herself up which upset her (and us!), so she's not had a full night's sleep for weeks either, which isn't helping any of us. She's fine in the mornings and we didn't have any complaints from the nursery yesterday about her runny nose or cough, so it's just something that affects her badly at night, which doesn't help when Olga takes her to see the GP during the day, as at that time Lara seems fine. Speaking of which, her next appointment is Thursday morning, so we'll see what the GP comes up with as a course of treatment then.
I'm sure I saw Lara making forward progress with her crawling last night too, which is a first! So far she's very good at going backwards but was having trouble finding first gear, but maybe she's heading in the right direction now, literally!
Olga also reported that Lara, when put on her playmat in the dining room today, found her own toybox and got the lid off it without any help from Olga... she'll be cooking her own meals next.