Thanksgiving!

This year for Thanksgiving, J and I drove down to California. We left on Tuesday and we took Chalcy with us.


On Tuesday, we spent all day driving. The trouble was, Chalcy is OCD with her bathroom habits. She will only relieve herself in our backyard--not on walks, not on hikes, not outside the vet's office on a patch of grass, not outside puppy preschool on a patch of grass, or at the dog park. Only in our backyard. It's a pretty good problem to have, as far as dog problems go. At least she doesn't chew our stuff.*


Anyway, so Chalce tried to hold it the whole way to California. We knew there was no way she could hold it for 10 hours, so we kept stopping. At first we only stopped every few hours or so, but after we had been driving for a while, we worried that she would have an accident in the car, so we stopped much more often (every 30 minutes or so). She liked all of the times we let her out of the car, but after we would walk around for 10 minutes and nothing was happening, we would get back in the car and keep going. Just past Vegas, J started to play rough with her when we took her out. Still nothing. We decided to put her in the hatchback portion of the car, since it at least has a plastic lining thing. That worked great! J put some clothes beneath her to absorb any accident. Then we quit stopping as often and we tried to just get to my grandma's house. It ended up taking us twelve hours. Chalcy totally made it, accident free. Good girl.

We were so sick and tired of stopping all the time, though, so I told J we should buy her some doggie diapers for the trip back up. We decided it would be worth it, at almost any cost. As we were heading into California, J became a little drowsy and I read him "testimonials" from fancy doggie diaper websites online. Some of them were pretty funny.

When we got to Grandma and Grandpa's, we picked our room, visited with my parents, and went to bed. It was already pretty late, and we were getting up early the next morning.

On Wednesday we went to Mexico! J had an appointment to get hookworms in Tijuana. I think I would like to blog more about this separately, so for now I'll leave it at that. It's an interesting story, though. After Mexico, we drove back up to Grandma's house and visited with my mom and brothers for the evening.

On Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving! It was fun because my family all came over to Grandma and Grandpa's, and the boys played with Chalcy a whole lot. I helped my mom make some posters for her Weight Watchers meeting that she was going to lead the next day. We got to meet Steph's boyfriend Alan, and we got to see Nathan look surprised (some more).

Friday, J and I attended my mom's WW meeting as guests. It was fun because there was this lady in her group who kept talking and talking, and finally at some point she mentioned being Italian. At the end of the meeting she and I talked for a little while in Italian, about all kinds of different stuff. I enjoyed that. (I don't know if J had ever really heard me speak Italian with anyone before, either, so I think it was kind of interesting for him, too.) Then we went and helped my mom move stuff to a smaller storage unit. We got my boxes separated out so that Sarah could help me bring them up to Utah. (Hooray!)** Then we went over to Tracy and Freddy's house to pick up the barbecue and see if we could fit it in our little car with the seat folded down. IT FIT! We also helped them pack for a little while, because they were moving to Phoenix the next day.

On Saturday we had a long (but very nice!) breakfast with Steph and Alan. We thought Alan was great! (Steph was too.) Then we bought doggie diapers at Petco. And J took my dad out to lunch, and I visited with my mom some more. I don't remember what else we did.

And then, we got up at 4 am on Sunday to start driving home. Sunday was supposed to be sunny, until partway through the week when it switched to being a big snowstorm. By leaving so early, we figured we could drive through Cedar City, etc, during the warmer parts of the day, and be home in the early evening. Sarah drove up with us, so that if she wanted a break from driving we could help her, or if she had any problems with the snow, we could help her. She was just fine, as it turned out. But I think she was glad she had left early anyway. The snowstorm made our drive back very slow and a little slippery.

And we made it home safely.

The end.***

Oh, and the picture of Chalcy with something in her mouth is from when we gave her pieces of ice from the cooler and she ate them.

Oh, and the other funny thing was, at 5 am on Sunday, we discovered the largest size of doggie diapers didn't fit Chalcy. So we had to use duct tape to re-size a diaper by extending its velcro attacher-things. You can see it in the picture.

* Except our chickens. Ugh.
** Except now we have Mt. Emily in the garage. Sigh.
*** Except for the story about the worms.