Friday Evening...

As in most families, I'm sure, since Jude came along, Buddy has taken a back seat. The bathroom that was once his bathing room was ripped apart and never put back together. He has been reduced to taking very infrequent showers in our bathroom (which actually proves to be much easier). He doesn't see the vet quite as often as he should. His nails are always just a little too long, doesn't have enough toys and we often are scraping the bottom of his food tub for a meal. It's pathetic and he is starting to let us know.

We are beginning to find little Buddy droppings in the dining room, he is taking up more and more space in the bed and he is in your face any chance he can. Lately, he's been growing really antsy. This is not just because of Jude, but because of the weather too. So, we decided to take him to the dog park. We've been saying we need to, and tonight, we just did. We made the decision in a matter of like 2 minutes. Hoping into the car, you could tell Buddy was thrilled to be going somewhere... anywhere!

When we pulled into the park, he was pulling on his leash with excitement and marking his way all the way into the fence. When we let him off his leash, he just took off. He could care less about Ryan, Jude and I. He was free! He was free to run! To make friends! To yelp (embarrassingly) at the little dog on the other side of the fence! It made me both happy and sad to see him having such a great time! Happy, because he deserved it... Sad, that we don't do it more often.

After a few minutes, Jude was losing his patience, so I took him over to the jungle gym while Ryan made sure Buddy was well behaved. For the first time, I put Jude in a swing (one of those round rubber onces with the legs cut out) and pushed. HE LOVED IT! He had this look on his face that just screamed to me "this is so much better than that baby swing you tried to get me into". He giggled. He laughed. He threw his head back as he weightlessly fell back and forth with each push. Then of course, as with all things, he began to lose interest just as Buddy was also running out of energy.

We loaded up our boys and headed home. I look forward to this Spring and hope that as the weather warms up I'll take some afternoons to not only get Jude out and about, but also to let Buddy get some exercise.

Following the dog park, I was thrilled when Ryan told me he was going to start some work on the house. A couple months back, we had bought a lot of the things we needed to re-wire the house. Once all the wire is run and holes are patched, I can finally begin doing some of the things to make the house 'pretty', so this is huge for me! After we got home, Ryan cut all the holes for the new receptacles, figured out placement for lights and basically mapped out his plan for tomorrow.

Last but not least... I got to spend some much needed time with my Feghan love. When I was working full time, Meghan and I's schedules constantly conflicted. She worked mostly nights and weekends while I worked during the day. As luck would have it, as I made the transition to night and weekend hours, she got a job working during the day - in addition to some pretty demanding evening hours. We don't see each other nearly as much as we should, so we got to catch up and go out for a nice dinner together. I left Ryan on baby duty and had an oh-so-wonderful time...

The weekend has only just begun and it's already a great start.