Well as it always does Christmas came with a flurry of last minute shopping, baking, wrapping and snapping. Lol. I’m sure you know what I mean.  It seems like by the time Christmas is here I am a frazzled mess.  How does this happen?  I don’t mean for it to but it does.  Every. Single. Year.  I think I made ten trips to the grocery store this past week.  I wrapped presents and arranged get togethers and I loved all of that. And then it was over.  Just like that.  And I feel so free and liberated.  Who needs a present? nobody?  How many peanut butter balls do I need? zero.  How many gifts need to be wrapped? none.  Wow what will I do with all this free time.  I am sure I will find something.

We always have Christmas Eve at my sister Sandy’s house. This is for my side of the family.  For several years Mark has had to work and didn’t make it.  But he got off from work in time this year and was able to join us at my sister’s house.  We usually have about 25-30 people there.  Brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews.  It is a lot of fun but also a lot of work. Everyone brings a covered dish and we do a dirty Santa drawing and we have so much fun.  All the littles still get presents from everyone so that is always fun to watch.

These are my nieces and nephews.  I think children is what Christmas is all about.  I enjoy spending time with them and watching them get so excited about opening presents.

So before going to my sister’s house on Christmas Eve I went in to work for a few hours.  I was walking into the village area where all of the gift shops are located and I stepped onto a wooden ramp that was slick with rain.  Just about the time I thought man this is slick. I fell flat on my back.  Luckily the village is not open so no one else was there.  I still had our maintenance department rope off the ramp just in case someone wandered over there.   The padding from my butt broke a good part of the fall. This is a time when the extra padding comes in handy.  I hit so hard it rattled my teeth.  I just laid there for a moment trying to determine whether anything was broken.  Once I was sure that I could move and bones were not sticking out I got up and limped off.  My back and hips hurt the rest of the day.  So needless to say I wasn’t in a very festive mood for our Christmas Eve get together.  I feel very fortunate that nothing was broken and I was able to walk away.

On Christmas Day I cooked dinner for my husband’s family, there is only three of them.  My sister in law brought her mother and my other sister in law came and then my sister and nephew arrived for dessert.   So we had about nine people and it was awesome!!!!  I love having people at my house even though it is a lot of work cooking and cleaning.  I always invite anyone who wants to come so I never know exactly how many people will show up.  I just make sure I cook a lot and I usually send the extra food home with people.

Scruffy loves my mother in law.  Actually he loves anyone sitting in this chair.  He will jump up and be snuggled by whomever happens to be in the chair.  He’s an equal opportunity lap dog.

The honey baked ham.  Yes it was delicious and we are still eating the leftovers.

Kitty Kitty can’t be bothered by all that is going on.  She still has to have her naps.

Santa was good to the babies.  As you can see Scruffy really loved that little blue Lamb Chop toy.

This is a life size Santa that Mark and I bought when we were first married.  We put him in our upstairs window so when you drive up you can see him looking out the window.  He is over twenty five years old, made of the hard plastic and we love him so.  I will admit I almost gave him away a few years ago because he was so big and took up so much room in the basement from Christmas to Christmas.  I am so glad I didn’t. Plus Mark would never have forgiven me. lol.

You know Christmas is not always easy.  It often looks like a lot of fun and festivities but many times people are missing loved ones and there is sometimes disappointments from expectations at Christmas time.  Christmas is sometimes a trying time especially as you get older.  Have extra consideration for your friends and loved ones during the holidays.  I hope you had a very Merry Christmas.

Always remember

Love your day your way

 

 

When I was a little girl I got a doll every year for Christmas and my Birthday until I was probably twelve years old.  I loved my dolls.  So when I was about seven or so I saw an ad in the back of one of my mama’s magazines for 100 dolls and I just had to have them.I guess Christmas time makes me think about what I always got for Christmas as a child and it made me think of my dolls and my 100 dolls I bought for $1.99.  Here is the story:

The ad read, 100 Little Dolls for only $1.99.  I was barely old enough to read when I first saw this ad.  It showed little dolls from all over the world wearing costumes from their native countries.  This was in the early 70’s and I was just a little kid and I didn’t think about anything but how I wanted those dolls.  I had to have the 100 dolls for $1.99.

Every time I would pick up a magazine I would quickly flip to the back and hold my breath until I saw the ” Doll Ad”. Whew, it was still there.  I begged and begged my mother to order me the dolls.  She said it could not be possible that you could order 100 dolls for only $1.99.  It was just too good to be true.  I begged and begged until she agreed that we would order them. She said well if anything came at all maybe it would be worth $1.99.

We addressed the envelope and put $2.00 inside.  We also taped two quarters for the postage onto a piece of cardboard and put it inside the envelope.  My mama looked a little skeptical that postage for 100 dolls could only be fifty cents but we did it.  It said to allow four to six weeks for delivery.

The minute we put the envelope in the mail I started dreaming of the dolls.  How I would dress them? where would I put them? What in the world would I name all of them? I had to make room for all of these dolls coming in the mail in a few weeks.

I ask my mama what would they be wearing? would they have different outfits for each country?  My mama and I speculated and wondered and dreamed.  Mama said I should just forget about them for awhile because they wouldn’t be here for several weeks.  Ha, no chance that I could forget about them for a second,  that just wasn’t going to happen.

After about four weeks I started waiting for the mailman every day. School was out for the summer so I could watch for the mailman who arrived every day at around 11:00 AM.  If our mailman had a large package that was too big to fit in our mailbox he would blow the horn and we would go out and get it. So I waited to hear him blow the horn to let us know he had a large package full of beautiful dolls.

One day as I was waiting at my post by the front door, the mailman pulled up and I saw him put a largish yellow envelope into the box.  It was not much bigger than a regular sized envelope.  Well that can’t be it I thought.

I went down to the mailbox and got the envelope.  It had my name on it. Surely there was no way this could be dolls. Maybe it was something explaining about when the dolls would arrive.   I ran to the house to show my mama.  We tore open the envelope and a bunch of tiny, hard, plastic dolls fell out. They were all pink.  They were barely an inch tall.  They were sort of like the hard plastic cowboy and Indian figures that my little brother played with.

    This is what they looked like.  Not a great picture but you get the idea.  

I looked at my mama in disbelief and she looked at me the same way.  I cannot tell you the disappointment I felt.  For weeks I had imagined my dolls and all the things I would do with them and how I would dress them.  It was devastating to this little girl.  How could someone put such false advertisement in a magazine?  My mama didn’t even say ” I tried to tell you”.

My mama and I counted the dolls and there wasn’t even 100. Not that I wanted 100 of those dreadful things anyway.  Many many of them were duplicates.  I was so angry I wanted to throw them away but mama carefully picked them up and put them in a little basket. She said that I might want to play with them one day.

As my mama and I put the dolls away we looked at each other and started laughing. My mama knew I was close to tears and she was trying to keep that from happening.  We laughed and laughed imagining this crazy story we would tell the rest of my family. Especially my two older teenage sisters who had made fun of me for ordering the dolls.  You see this was the great thing about my sweet mama she could find the humor in anything and make me feel better.

I never did play with those dolls and I have no idea what happened to them.  I recently searched the internet for an ad about them and actually found some of the dolls for sale!!!  That’s where the picture above came from.  Vintage they are now called. You can buy five or six of them for $6.95.  Wow how inflation has changed things.

A good lesson I suppose, and one that I will never forget.  Do I still love dolls?  Ahhhh no. I actually find them a little creepy.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed reading.

Always remember.

Love your day your way

 

 

She was the runt of the litter.  The first time I saw her I fell in love.  We got her from a man in Knoxville who raised Basset Hounds.  Being the runt she was smaller than her brothers and sisters and I didn’t know it then but we were in for a world of health issues.

It was the fall of 2004.  The hubs and I hadn’t had an inside fur baby for several years.  I will have to admit it had been sort of nice knowing that when we went out of town we didn’t have to worry about having someone stay at the house or board our babies.  My father in law who lived next door to us would just come over and feed our outside girl and make sure she was o.k. and put her in the garage at night. But I missed having a dog in the house. I missed the snuggles and the attention given to a fur baby.

I always wanted a Basset Hound, so we found someone in Knoxville who had a litter that would be available in a couple of weeks.  She was multi colored and as I said the runt of the litter.  We didn’t know that until we picked her up.  She was only five weeks old and technically too young to be leaving her mama.  The breeder told us she was six weeks old but when we got the paper work on her and saw her birthdate we realized she was just five weeks old.  We took her anyway.  I felt like at this point I just couldn’t leave her behind.  I bonded with her the minute I looked into those big brown eyes.

Because of the multi coloring on her fur which looked like large patches we appropriately named her Patches.  She was an adorable puppy but about the most annoying dog you have ever seen.  She had the most mournful, sad, braying howl that you have ever heard.  I think we were in puppy hell for about three years.  I thought the puppy stage would never end.  But it did.  She mellowed out, she slowed down, she had a lot of health issues. But I think it made us love her all the more.

The first thing was a cherry eye.  this happened before she turned six months old.  A huge red ulcer popped out under her eye.  I thought it was because she had strained too hard on her leash.  I took her to the vet and they told me she had a cherry eye.  Basset hounds were pre disposed to them. It was time for her to be spayed so we had the cherry eye removed at the same time.

Throughout the years she developed several cancerous ulcers in her mouth.  Especially in the front of her gums.  We had them removed time after time.  It got to a point where she almost didn’t have front bottom teeth because she had had so many tumors removed.   She was such a needy girl.  She wanted me with her constantly.  She would sit and stare at me adoringly.  She was a big girl yet she liked to get on my lap and lay her head on my shoulder and gaze at me while her legs hung off of the bottom of the chair.

One day she ate a rock and was so sick I thought we were going to lose her. We didn’t know what was going on.  She passed the rock and the vet couldn’t believe it hadn’t done damage to her insides it was so large. She would eat anything!!!  I had to constantly watch her even after she got older.  She ate moles!!  My outside dog would dig them up and then Patches would grab them and chew them up before I could even get them out of her mouth.

In the spring of 2015 I noticed a lump on Patches’ neck. We took her to the vet and was told it was just a fatty tumor and nothing to worry about.  It was about the size of an egg. We didn’t think anymore about it but a month or so later I noticed it looked like the lump had gotten larger.  When I felt it I panicked. It was larger, it was the size of a softball.  I took her to a different vet.  This one told me that it was not a fatty tumor it was a malignant tumor.  There was no way to remove it because it was so deep there wouldn’t be enough skin to cover the wound.   We had an option to take her for chemo and radiation. They were not sure that this would do much more than just shrink the tumor and not completely get rid of the cancer. Patches was almost eleven years old.  We would have to leave her for long periods of time at the vet clinic almost 50 miles from us to have the treatments.  She had separation anxiety so bad, whenever I had left her in the past, that I had to give her valium and she usually developed a terrible case of diarrhea and had to be put on medication for it.  We decided not to put her through that.  We would love her and care for her as long as we could.

The “As long as we could” turned out to be almost a year.  For the most part she was fine she still got around really well.  She just had this huge tumor on the side of her neck and it was getting bigger.  She still liked to play but as the tumor got larger she had a hard time running.  She started to slow down. We had her monitored at the vet regularly.  They told us there was a chance that the tumor would get so large it would burst.  When this happened she would die almost immediately.  I couldn’t imagine this happening to my poor girl.

In late February on a Friday we called the vet and told them we thought it was time to let Patches go.  Anything after that we felt was just being selfish for us and not thinking about her.  We had to wait until the following Monday.  I spent the entire weekend loving on her but my heart breaking at the same time knowing what was coming.  She was uncomfortable by this time and didn’t get around a lot.  We spent the weekend mostly outside, which she loved, on a blanket in the back yard.  It was unusually warm for the end of February and sunny.  We laid in the sun and shared our last hours together.

  I don’t think you can see it but the tumor was on her right side.  She is lying on it so you can’t tell how large it is.

On Monday Mark suggested that I stay behind and he and my father in law would take Patches to the vet for the last time. He thought this might be easier for me.  I had always been with my other fur babies in the past when this time came and it was always terrible.  I knew it would be even worse with Patches.  I agreed.  I would stay home.  But when It came time, I couldn’t.  I had to be with my girl to the very end.  She depended on me for everything.  I would see her through this.

We took the short ride to the vet.  They would give her a shot to put her into a sleep and then administer another shot to stop her heart.  Mark became so emotional he had to leave the room a couple of times.   I stood right there holding her in my arms and whispering in her ear that I would see her again soon.  It was February 29th, Leap Year.  I thought it was fitting because she was always such an unusual baby.

As they say hindsight is 20-20 and when I look back on it I wish we had had the tumor checked out by a second vet when it was no bigger than an egg.  Maybe then it could have been removed.  I think of ways it could have been different.

When thinking of a name for my blog I decided to name it after my sweet baby Patches. I will never forget her and she lives on everyday in my heart.  And being the southerner through and through that I am the southern part was not hard to figure out. So Southern Patches became the name of my blog.

Today is Patches’ Birthday, December 5th.  Happy Birthday to my sweet Patches.  I will always love you. I will never forget you.

If you have made it this far thank you for reading.

Always remember
Love your day your way!!!