To Do List- This-check, That-check Yay! we finished

I had quite the busy Friday, my husband and I ran all over town paying bills, shopping and setting up our son's 6th birthday party. It is always a challenge to get everything we need done on Fridays because it is the only day that we have to do things together without our son complaining that he is SOOOO bored! He is in all day kindergarten which gives my husband and I time to spend together to pay bills or do something special. We like to call them Date Days instead of Date Nights, unless Brenner spends the weekend with Grandma.
Friday my package came from babyhopes.com and I was super excited. I immediately took my first dose of Vitex and brewed my first cup of Fertilitea. As soon as I opened the bag I got this amazing peppermint smell! I waited the whole ten minutes for it to brew. I really liked the taste of this tea.
Kids say the cutest and funniest things! Today my son woke up and told us that he had a dream last night so we of course asked him "Well what did you dream about?" He replied " I dreamed that I peed in a cup!" (as my husband and I start to crack up) Brenner gets upset and yells " It's not funny I dreamed I peed in a cup and I was at Grandmas house!"
Our son's birthday party will be at a bowling alley and will have ten kids ages 5-6. I am very excited about the party!
Something new my husband and I are doing is changing our system for dealing with bills and appointments. I bought a budget book, a monthly planner, a filing case (not to be confused with a filing cabinet which is MUCH bigger), a stapler (ours broke), and a PAID stamp. My goal is to sit down and make a budget every couple of months editing them as we go along if we add or delete something. Every time we get a bill I will file it in the correct labeled file and when we get all of the bills that need to be paid at the beginning of the month and pay them then stamp each bill with "PAID" and file them again and the same thing with the middle and the end of the month. I will keep six months worth of bills in my filing case, then move them to the filing cabinet for another six months. After the six months I will be moving them to the shredder! It may seem like a lot of work and it probably will be but I want to be prepared for anything and make sure we don't forget to pay a bill again. I like the idea of paperless billing but having paper bills keeps me more organized and I don't have to waste the ink and paper from our personal printer.
A little note on how Angel is doing: she seems much happier. Her ears are not so red and I don't see her scratching her ears as much. I'm not sure if this is going to be related to the medicine or the new food but Angel's pads on her feet are much softer and smoother. Normally her feet pads and elbows are really rough.
Spring is coming up and I've got an urge to "Spring clean" normally I'm not much of a spring cleaner but after our move last year I have found I keep coming back to things from previous homes that are still lingering and we don't need them. So in the next few weeks I am going to be purging this house of clutter and clothes that no longer fit!

Our Journey to Having a Second Baby

Some couples accidentally get pregnant, some couples get pregnant on their first try, some couples like my husband and I just can't seem to succeed in the whole baby making process. For us part of the issue has been my hormones going all crazy sometimes not giving me a cycle for months at a time. Another part of it is we just can not seem to get our timing right. This being a new year my baby fever has come back with a vengeance so I sort of have a plan... Here goes our plan:
     * Get back control over my body and my cycles
     * Start on a fertility tea to help better my chances of becoming pregnant
     * Start telling myself positive affirmations ( I am fertile, I can get pregnant, This will happen for us, healthy     body, healthy baby)
     * Start charting my cycles again so I know where I stand
     * Implement "Sperm meets egg plan"
  Let me just say that the TTC community on youtube is fabulous. There is such support and understanding from these ladies who live so far away but yet feel so close to your heart because we all have the same goal of getting pregnant and having the family that we always knew we wanted. I came across a few ladies on Youtube.com who talk about the "Sperm meets egg plan" and for those of you who don't know what that is basically the short version is you baby dance every other night starting cycle day 8. On cycle day 10 start your opk testing and when you get that positive baby dance that night and two more nights in a row skip one day.You can do a pregnancy test 15 days after your positive opk if you haven't had your period.If you haven't gotten your period yet baby dance every other day until cycle day 35 and if you still haven't gotten your period you may want to do another pregnancy test. So my goal is to try this sperm meets egg plan on a  cycle and see what happens. For me this plan may not work because at this point I am not even sure if I am even ovulating, but I have to stay positive and visualize my egg being released and meeting up with the sperm and creating my precious cargo.
So here is a run down of my current cycle. Currently on cycle #1, cycle day 69. I thought this was going to be my happy cycle where everything went back to normal and I had 28 day cycles again, boy was I wrong! Cycle day 28 came and went and I got more and more frustrated.  I got to cycle day 36 and stopped taking my temperature. I took multiple pregnancy tests which came up STARK white. I had a positive opk and we baby danced on the right days. I suppose this just isn't my cycle. Here I sit, willing my body to start my new cycle already. I am pretty sure at this point I will need a doctors assistance in order to get pregnant but at this point in time I have to stay positive and keep trying to get our timing right. We put in my order today for my fertility tea (loose leaf) and a tea ball as well as vitex capsules. I hope that we get pregnant soon! Baby Dust to everyone who is trying!

Onward medication and potty breaks...road to recovery here we come...

So far so good with Angel's medication and food! She gladly ate every last morsel of food and didn't put up much of a fuss with taking her medication. We had a minor freak out when she saw the ear drops. She tried to go hide under my end table, but in the end she sat there like a good little eight year old dog. Poor girl has had so many ear problems she knows what the small bottle of liquid is!
Angel let me give her the medication without any problems! Yay! As the vet warned us the medication would make her hungry and EXTRA thirsty... boy did it ever. I split her food up in to two separate feedings to try to curb her hunger without increasing her food intake. So, she was fed in the morning and again in the afternoon. Normally I feed the dogs in the morning and they are fine throughout the rest of the day. Thankfully the new food did not make Angel's tummy upset, but she definitely had many more trips to the water bowl and in turn had to go out more but that is okay because she is on the road to recovery (we hope).   

Vets, dog food and ingredients oh my!

     Today I discovered at my dogs,(yes I said dogs as in three of them at the same time) yearly veterinarian visit that my eight year old dog has severe food allergies. We have had to completely switch her food to something that she has never had before to rule out anything that she could be allergic to and let me tell you that was not a very easy thing to do, considering how many dog food products that are out there. This means that I had to sift through the very abundant ingredient list on many brands of dog food. After our vet visit after the umpteenth ear infection, or so we thought that our poor dog has had over the years, my husband and I spent nearly an hour and a half searching the internet for ingredient lists of all three of the different brands of dog food we have had our dog on over the years we finally found a product that doesn't have any of the  ingredients listed that previous ones we used had. Tomorrow will be day one of my dog’s medication and food switch. Wish me luck!            

   Our dog's veterinarian has Angel on ear drops once a day and Prednisone twice a day for ten days then once a day for ten days then every other day after that. (Confused yet?) Boy this will be fun trying to get my dog to take these pills twice a day without the help of a cheese ball or hotdog piece! Thanks a lot allergies! I am hoping that my dog shows improvement after the ten weeks of the combined food change and the medication.  I have to take Angel back to the vet to see if there have been significant improvement after her medication runs out, lets hope this did the trick or we will be back to more medication and a DIFFERENT kind of food yet again...  I was given the warnings that she may need to drink more during the day which in turn means MORE potty breaks. She will also be wanting to eat MORE but she has to be on a very strict diet because of the medication she will be taking which could cause her to gain weight... not to mention I have to keep a very strict eye on my five year old son sneaking Angel food (Picture this: Mommy, Angel ACCIDENTALLY *yeah right*ate my food) The whole purpose of this drastic food change is to figure out if it truly is a food allergy that is causing her ear problems BUT if she eats anything other than the new food and the medicine she was prescribed I may as well have not done the food change in the first place...and had the extra cost of the ridiculously overpriced dog food coming in at $54 for a 28 pound bag compared to $16 dollar bag I use to buy every week! I sure hope this helps my poor dog....

    On the bright side, besides Angel's allergy and ear issue and being two pounds overweight she is in overall good health. My other two dogs are very healthy as well. I feel so bad for them every time I take them to see the veterinarian because I have to be the one to hold them to comfort them while the doctor sneaks behind them to poke them in the hiney! Angel is a female black lab/boxer mix (the one with the allergy problems) is eight years old and very puppy like at times, weighing in at 82.4 pounds.

My second dog Kyler is an almost three year old male chihuahua, weighing in and 8.6 pounds. He is in perfect health besides being not even a half of a pound overweight... (The doctor even commented on his very pretty white teeth!) He had cherry eyes as a puppy, but needed surgical attention because they were making his vision cloudy. I am very proud to say he is much better and can see perfectly now. 

My third dog is Lilly, she is very shy and does not like people other than my husband, myself and my son. She is one years old and is a chihuahua/terrier mix weighing in at 6.2 pounds.  She is very healthy and in fact she has gained TWO pounds since her last visit to the vet last fall when she was UNDER weight! Yeah, go me for finding the right food for her since she is so tiny and picky ( I have to find food that is tiny enough that it doesn't hurt her little mouth to chew it and make sure she likes it... that is not so easy). 

So as a close I hope tomorrow goes smooth for me with trying to convince Angel (more like beg her) to take her pills without spiting it out or throwing it up and praying that the new food doesn't upset her stomach...