rose*art: August

Tony who got us home!

Amazingly we made it to Texas in Tony. One of the first things I did was go on our computer, to look at the Irving Shelter website and see what animals had been brought in. They always post pictures of each new animal dropped off there. I found one that I thought looked like Pepper, the dog had been picked up down the road from our house. Crazy thing is she was not dropped at the shelter till after mid July, so who knows where she had been during her first week or so of running off. I raced or should I say carefully drove our patched up Tony to the shelter. It was chaos at the shelter, nobody at first could answer my questions, they didn't know where the dog was etc. Finally a guy took me to the back where the strays are kept and we searched for the dog they had named Cara. When we did find her, she was emaciated with runny bloodshot eyes. I could not honestly tell for sure if it was her. I thought so but she was so sick and out of it, that is was really hard to tell. I asked what I had to do to get her out, the guy said that I would have to come back the next day and talk to the manager. So the next day Franz the boys and I went and saw the dog they were calling Cara. I had looked at our most recent photos of Pepper to have a hopefully a better idea if it was her. She has a few distinct markings and she also cocks her one ear crooked. We did determine that it was her, but after talking to the manager we were told we would have to come back the next day, because they could not release her till she had been checked over by a vet to makes sure she didn't have something fatal. We went the next day and the vet determined she and a really bad respiratory infection and was under nourished. They agreed to let us take her home for a fostering period. We would get her healthy so that she could be spayed and then we could adopt her after that. Pepper had to take three medications. A couple weeks later when she was a lot better and looked more like her self, we brought her back to be spayed. We were figuring that we would have to pay 80-100 dollars for everything. She was vaccinated, spayed, defleaed, and had been on medicine, so when I signed the papers and only had to pay 30 dollars total, we were pleasantly surprised and very thankful. It is not how we had planned on taking care of Pepper, but it was a blessing in disguise, saving us lots of money.

Since Tony was on his way out and our family would be expanding. We started searching for a van. We ended up finding one from a small dealer who worked from his home. The van is a gold Dodge Grand Caravan 2005, with 100,000 miles on it. We liked how it drove and after having it inspected decided that it would be our new family vehicle. The van is christened Mona. Cyprian wanted Lisa, but I decided on Mona, or you could say Mona Lisa:')

Our new van who I named Mona

At this point in pregnancy I was still having a hard time with my appetite. The heat was not helping matters either. Or maybe it was the fact that we butchered most of our meat chickens throughout the month of August.

Me rinsing a chicken.

One evening shortly after getting Pepper back, I was out front on our deck calling Pepper, so that I could give her her medication. I heard and saw a truck lose control come flying into our fence taking out most of the front fencing, hit our mailbox, a huge light pole making sparks fly and lines go down. take out most of the fence on the other side of our drive way and final stop enmeshed in really thick grape vines that covered the fence. It was a young Hispanic couple who had been driving way to fast and were goofing off with another truck that had another young couple in it. Since I saw the whole thing when the police came, I ended up talking to them. The driver was not really talking to them. So I told them what I saw. I did learn that they were trying to say that their tire popped and that is why they lost control. I saw them from start to finish and it was not a tire blowing that caused them to lose control. They were going way to fast playing around. Thankfully no one was hurt. We could not drive out our drive way because there were wires down. It wasn't till 2 something in the morning that the light pole was repaired and the wires restrung. I seem to have the timing for witnessing crazy things...

The first half our front fence downed

Our mailbox

The new light pole and the rest of the fence that was downed, in the distance there is a bumper sitting in the vines.

The rest of the month the boys and I spent trying not to melt in the heat. I was starting to show a baby bump. The boys would entertain themselves in various creative ways. Pepper started to look and act healthy. Augustine was both glad and annoyed to have Pepper back. The first day she came home Augustine rubbed against Pepper, by the end of the month he was giving her a bloody nose and or ears....