We made it through the holiday season!
I love the holidays. Our celebration of the season also includes birthday parties for both of our girls! Whew! 16 and 13 now. Wow. There are days when I wish we could just seclude ourselves from the rest of the world, stay warm by the fire, do puzzles and watch movies. But no. There's much to do in December!
We had quite a scare added to our holiday and I learned a lesson about the care and feeding of dogs. While we were celebrating my father-in-law's birthday on December 24th (yep, another birthday) I completely disregarded the fact that I had seen a huge bag of M&M's on the floor of Katie's bedroom earlier in the day. While we were out of the house our lovely Chocolate Lab Benny (8 yrs. old) devoured the entire 4 lbs. bag.
We returned around 8:00 pm and Katie saw the empty bag in her room. We know that dogs shouldn't eat chocolate, however Benny has had chocolate before - got into an Easter basket the first year we had him, - and the chocolate didn't effect him then. But this was an enormous amount of chocolate - 4 pounds - and even though he was getting rid of it (all over our carpet! Merry Christmas!) the toxin that was flowing through his body was putting him in great distress and his heart couldn't take it. Benny's Christmas was spent in the animal hospital. We did our best to think positively and have some fun with the holiday, but we were all distracted.
We were able to bring him home the next day, and it's been slow and steady with the recovery.
He's almost back to his hyper self. Little walks here and there. And cuddles with his new teddy bear. We're going to hold off on his traditional present, a Christmas dog bone. Rob gets the biggest one he can find. It's longer than Benny is! Maybe another week and his system will be ready.
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I love the holidays. Our celebration of the season also includes birthday parties for both of our girls! Whew! 16 and 13 now. Wow. There are days when I wish we could just seclude ourselves from the rest of the world, stay warm by the fire, do puzzles and watch movies. But no. There's much to do in December!
We had quite a scare added to our holiday and I learned a lesson about the care and feeding of dogs. While we were celebrating my father-in-law's birthday on December 24th (yep, another birthday) I completely disregarded the fact that I had seen a huge bag of M&M's on the floor of Katie's bedroom earlier in the day. While we were out of the house our lovely Chocolate Lab Benny (8 yrs. old) devoured the entire 4 lbs. bag.
We returned around 8:00 pm and Katie saw the empty bag in her room. We know that dogs shouldn't eat chocolate, however Benny has had chocolate before - got into an Easter basket the first year we had him, - and the chocolate didn't effect him then. But this was an enormous amount of chocolate - 4 pounds - and even though he was getting rid of it (all over our carpet! Merry Christmas!) the toxin that was flowing through his body was putting him in great distress and his heart couldn't take it. Benny's Christmas was spent in the animal hospital. We did our best to think positively and have some fun with the holiday, but we were all distracted.
We were able to bring him home the next day, and it's been slow and steady with the recovery.
.