I'm not sure what it is about my dogs following me around that drives me insane, but I just can't stand it. I keep trying to tell them that my life is just not that exciting. Go ahead and keep napping, you don't need to come with me while I get a snack, or check my e-mail, or go to the bathroom. I'll just be in the other room, I promise. Yesterday, I'm not sure if the dogs were hearing something outside that freaked them out or what, but Duncan was just being ridiculous with the following. I sat down on our bedroom floor to dry my hair and had my head down, and when I lifted it up he was literally a foot from my face.

Maybe it's just the fact that I feel a little bit stuck inside the house sometimes, and Duncan following me around watching my every move makes me feel even more trapped. Plus it reminds me that I'm not really doing anything worth following. I had high hopes of using the time that Noelle is at Parent's Day Out to plan some activities for the two of us during the rest of the week, but so far it seems like I've needed that time just to catch up on the day to day household stuff. Laundry, picking up toys, cleaning dishes, sweeping the floor, and catching up on my work take up a very large chunk of those 10 hours. And Nacho and Duncan follow behind the whole time.

I am hoping that as Duncan gets older, he'll settle down a little bit. So far there is not really any indication of that. Oh well, at least he doesn't pee in the house anymore - at least not very often. I know my irritation with the dogs is pretty obvious, because Noelle has picked up a few key phrases that I say to them all the time. Knock it off! Nacho, get. Boys, cool it. Back off! Chill out, Duncan. She says all of these and more, all because of mommy. I guess the best I can hope for is that as Noelle gets older they start following her instead! Maybe they can even sleep in her room!

Yesterday was a bad day to be a dog in this house.

In the morning, I let Duncan outside and when he came back in, took him straight to the bathtub because he was so muddy. It looked like he had been in a fight, and he probably had been with the dogs behind the fence in our backyard. I grabbed his front foot to wash it, and he squealed in pain. I looked down and realized he was bleeding, and upon closer inspection, it looked like he was missing an entire nail. I was heading out, so I wrapped it in paper towel and tape and left. When I got back, he had soaked through all of that and left little blood marks all over the house. It was still bleeding, so I decided a vet visit was in order. They confirmed that the whole nail was missing, and basically just bandaged him up and gave us some antibiotics. He cracked us up yesterday with his limping and general patheticness.

Then last night, we were watching the last disk of 24: Season 5 and heard something going on in the bathroom. Nacho was in there laying on the bathroom mat having a seizure. He has them every so often and they aren't a huge deal, but they are scary. With a little loving from daddy he was as good as new.

It was a crazy dog day, and I was thankful for Noelle's 3 hour nap in the afternoon!

We start our childbirth classes tonight. I'm pretty excited about it, if only because that means we are getting closer to meeting this baby! We are taking them through the Vanderbilt Nurse-Midwife Center where we go for our appointments. The class is on Tuesday nights for the next 6 weeks. I'm not exactly sure what to expect, since my only experience with these types of classes is what I see on tv. I am sure that getting some facts and tips about the labor process will help calm some fears. I am not feeling any anxiety about that yet, but I am sure that I will get to that point. Right now, I'm more concerned with my inability to sleep through the night, the fact that I can't breath very easily at times, and the relentless activity of this child inside me. All of those, combined with occasional nausea, stomach and/or back pain, are making my work experience a lot more difficult. It's bad enough that I spend my days sitting at a computer trying to entertain myself.

So we took our stray cat in to be spayed, and apparently she was pregnant. Not knowing anything about cats, we assumed that she was still pregnant even after the spay, although we weren't sure exactly what spaying involved. I soon found out that they remove the entire uterus, meaning that we unknowingly participated in a kitten abortion. Although we are relieved to not have to care for a pregnant "queen" for several more weeks and then try and figure out what to do with the kittens, I was a little upset. Mom cat seems to be doing fine, though, and Andy is on a quiet campaign to try and keep her. My allergies are forming a revolt against his campaign, as are the dogs. She really is a sweet cat.

Some of you know that we have had two large piles of dirt in our front yard for several months, brought in for a landscaping project that we no longer have the funds for. I finally found some people to take it! We have 5 or 6 people all coming to take some of it, and hopefully that will get rid of it all! If there is a little left, we can of course just spread it out and seed it. But at least we won't have two small hills in the front yard anymore. It's all part of getting ready for the baby.

Last night, Nacho got stung repeatedly by a mob of yellowjackets out in the back yard. We knew they were there, because just last weekend Andy got attacked by the same mob while mowing the lawn. I noticed Nacho was a little too close for my comfort to the nest location, and before I could do anything he was running around like a crazy dog trying to swat the things off of himself. We quicky brushed him off and threw him in the bath to try and soothe the stings. After that, he went and hid under the bed, then came out and threw up twice on the bedroom floor, then started rolling around on every available surface trying to scratch his face. Then I noticed that his mouth was completely swollen to probably 3 times its normal size. Poor dog. We gave him some Benadryl and a children's aspirin, and the swelling started to go down eventually. It didn't totally go away until this morning. I thought about taking pictures, because he looked pretty darn funny with a humongous upper lip, but that would have just been mean.