Little baby George is a week old today.  I’ll post new pictures later (I have to take some for the “photo diary/log” and to send to his family and his daddy’s owner anyway).  Yes, I’ve been taking pictures almost daily of the little guy.  That may seem obsessive, but honestly, I swear If I look at him for 10 minutes, I can actually see him growing before my eyes.  Like my babies, they change so much, so fast.

At one day old, I could hold him flat on the palm of one hand.  At four days, he can’t be contained in two of my daughters.  (We have similar hand size).  We didn’t weigh him at birth.  We had intended to buy an appropriate scale, and ran out of time.  It was a good thing though. I remembered a couple days later that I had a postal scale and we’ve been charting his growth with that.  We estimate he was between 6 and 9 ounces at birth, certainly under a pound.  Yesterday he weighed two pounds (at 5 days old).

The wrinkles on his face, including the ‘rope’ over his nose become more pronounced daily.  I especially see huge changes around his eyes — and I expect they will open by the middle of next week.  Everyone is hoping he will have his daddy’s green eyes.  And hoping against hope that if not green than blue (the blue eyed gene is present on both sides).  Wouldn’t he just be gorgeous with blue eyes!

The most difficult part of the week has been, of course, the constant supervision.  Though I have to admit everyone in the family has been great about pitching in and taking a shift.  The late night watches are leaving me blurry eyes to a point.  No matter how late I stay up, my internal alarm clock wants me out of bed by 7 am most mornings.  I’ve succumbed to some afternoon naps, but for the most part they don’t really help and only make me wish I could sleep longer.   With the holiday weekend, I’m hoping to catch up on the sleep.

At one week, he’s still crawling vs. walking and still blind (and I understand deaf too).  He does respond to touch and is getting used to being held by me and my daughter.  Mommy Lily is still very protective and very concerned though she is allowing herself to leave the box while he is sleeping and doesn’t complain if I separate them for a few hours at night so I can sleep — but only a few hours.

Keep checking back for more pictures and more progress.  As soon as he is more active, I hope to include video as well.

After a long day and a half of Lily nesting and preparing for the pups. She gave birth to a male puppy at 1:15 AM Friday Morning (August 22). We were expecting a second pup and became concerned when her labor stopped. When the vet opened and after a phone call, we took her in to be examined. They determined that they needed to go in and do a c-section, but discovered (Before they cut her uterus) that she had begun to reabsorb the other puppy.

Finding out why would have involved cutting the uterus which would have compromised future pregnancies, but the thought it it hadn’t properly developed.

The puppies future home and his owners are anxiously waiting for him to grow up strong and have already named him George.

Everyone has fallen in love — including mommy Lily, who is taking very good care of the little guy. She’s also recovering well from her surgery.

He’s already demonstrating all the traits of a Olde English Bulldogge. His two favorite activities in his second day of life are sleeping and eating.

In the next few days we will be embarking on a brand new experience in our household, Olde English Bulldogge puppies. Well, that’s not exactly true. The puppies are due at any moment, and it isn’t really our first experience with them. The first experience would be when Lily came to our family.

My husband and I both have always been animal lovers, and we grew up with animals – mostly dogs – as constant members of our individual families. So, it was more or less understood we would have pets. Our first home together was in a mobile home park that didn’t allow dogs, so for the first few years we had cats and birds. While expecting our second child, my daughter, we decided it was time to take the big step into our first house, and the day we signed the purchase agreement, my husband came home with a lab puppy. (Ignoring the fact we didn’t take possession for 30 days. ) “What are they going to do, kick us out? We’re leaving anyway.” That was his response to my concerns.

Fourteen years later we lost that dog to old age. Even though we had added other dogs to the family, there was still a loss, a huge one and it was only a matter of time before my husband was considering another member of the family.

He was drawn to English Bulldogs; I was more than a little hesitant. They have a lot of health problems and they drool and snore, were just a couple of my concerns. The husband didn’t give up on his quest though, and while doing some research to calm my fears he discovered the newer Olde English Bulldogge breed. To say newer is a bit of a misnomer, as it is really an attempt to breed the dogs back to the stature they had at the turn of the century: taller, not so large heads. They do not have a many of the health concerns the more common breed has. As long as its snoring didn’t keep me up nights I was okay with it. I told him that as me, the kids, and one of their friends piled in the car to go to a movie. By the time we came home 2 hours later, Lily was a part of the family.
Most of the family welcomed her with open arms and hearts, with the exception of my small terrier mix who thought the world was crashing to an end with this new face to vie for mommy’s love. She spent two weeks under my desk with all the toys, daring any of the other dogs to try and take them from her.
I don’t think we were even aware of how hard and how fast we’d fallen for the little clown until a few months later she became quite ill. A victim of the tainted Diamond Dog food a few years ago, she developed aflatoxin poisoning that began shutting her liver down. It was the first of what has now been a few cases of tainted food and a very scary situation for a week we feared we were going to lose her, and had resigned ourselves to that, the night she began to turn around. (Our vet saw fourteen cases of the poisoning, only two dogs survived. One being Lily.)
We were grateful that she was going to recover, and if you thought she was a spoiled princess before… We were told she would have a long road ahead, may never fully recover from the liver damage. The vet told us to reconsider any thoughts of breeding her in the future. (They didn’t know just how much liver function she would regain.)
Within weeks, however, her liver function was back at 100% (Thankfully. She really hated the special diet.) She was back to normal, being our little clown and even the little terrier and her have become good friends. With no reason not to, we decided to help rebuild this breed when she came into season a year ago. Unfortunately, she didn’t conceive at that time, but she did go through a false pregnancy, which was a totally odd thing to watch.
This year, however, with a different male and the help of artificial insemination, Lily did conceive, and for what the ultrasound and the x-ray have told us will be having two puppies maybe in the next few hours… definitely within the next few days. Freedom is the proud papa, and am anxious to see if either of the pups will have his green eyes, or blue eyes that run in both blood lines. It’s almost as bad as when I was expecting my babies.
Over the next two months, I plan to share picture and stories as we go through the birthing and raising of the pups.

This is one of those hodge podge kind of posts where I just drop in a bunch of random thoughts and what’s going on and such, because I keep thinking I need to update the blog, and never have enough hours in the day to write a legitimate post.

Myspace -   Good lord, I was just on site, checking out what’s going on with my ‘friends’ as got a glimpse at how long it’s been since I’ve updated anything there.  Update my myspace is definitely on my list of things to do in the immediate future.

Website -  I guess right along side of that should be update the ol’ website, but I don’t know I’m still sort of kicking around the idea of just making this blog the only incarnation of the site for the time being.

Concerts - I went to two concerts in a forty-eight hour period last weekend, it was really sort of crazy.  Rick Springfield on Friday night up north of Detroit and Travis Tritt right here in town on Saturday night. They were both terrific in their individual ways and for the first time in a long time, I actually allowed myself to just enjoy the music.

I decided about a week before I wasn’t taking cameras and I wasn’t going to to take notes.  I wasn’t going to review either show, not for here, not for BC. (Yeah, I know, bad music editor.)

But I identified something in myself not that long ago. Some of the passion I used to feel toward music has slipped away from me lately. Listening to it, somedays, has become a chore. Sometimes I want to listen just because it makes me feel good, and somedays I want to go to a show, let my hair down, and just rock (the F***) out and not worry about the sound, the lights, or anything else.  So yeah, Friday night was all about Rockin’ out, dancing in the isles and having a blast.

But Saturday was an eye opener two.  We went to the rib-off to see Travis Tritt, because it was Saturday night in Toledo and there wasn’t anything else to do. (Seriously, this city sucks!)   I actually hemmed and hawed about even being there up to the man took the stage because the last time I had seen him live I was so disappointed.

It was hot.  My legs hurt from the night before.  I was wearing cute shows, not sensible shoes. And part of me almost said, “You want to go do something else” to my two partners in crime for the evening.  I am so glad I stuck it out!   Any misgivings I had based on the last time I had seen Mr. Tritt perform were erased within five minutes of him being on the stage… and two hour and twenty minutes later was he was topping off a twenty minute encore that had simply, no other word works here, rocked!

But in the interest of not reviewing these concerts… that’s all I have to say about that.

 Kentucky -  was an absolute and total blast! I could go on for pages here about all the fun and the learning experiences the kids had, but I won’t.  Unless, your into horses you would be bored to death.  If you are into horses, ask me about the trip next time you see me and if you’ve never been to Kentucky Horse Park, make arrangements to do so now.

The latest novel -  is done.  Was pretty much officially done mid-week, and I’ve spent two days going through a post-partum depression of sorts as I switch gears from creative to marketing/promotional.  I’m only going to allow myself a week or so of getting my agent list etc around and getting the queries in the mail, and then it’s onto either a) writing the new one  or b) totally reworking the vamp story I’m in love with and want to see a publisher fall in love with.  I’m leaning toward a, because I have this terrific idea brewing in my head and I’m pretty excited about it.  I’ll probably take a week to sketch out an outline and figure out a full plot, before I decide which way to go for sure.  In the meantime, I let you know here if anything breaks with IH.

Woo Hoo! The Night Shift starts tonight on Soapnet. There’s been so much buzz about this for so long, I’m excited to see if it turns out anything like it’s suppose to.

I will be recapping this as well as GH over at BC. Check out the index pages, because I sometimes get lazy about updating the links in the side bar.

Sneak Peak:

Making the Rounds at General Hospital - Burgers, Beer, and Bullets
Robin and Patrick are defiant while Stan tries to sabotage his date with Lainey. The police and mob clash.

Making the Rounds at General Hospital - Sam Cornered, Eli Collapses
Amelia tightens her grip on Sam, Carly sees Jason, Eli collapses.

Enter To Win: The Essential Paul Simon CD/DVD
Three lucky readers will win!

I can’t be the only one who loves that scene in The Secret Window when the Johnny Depp charter erases everything he just typed and says “no bad writing.” Good God can I identify with that.  And it’s become my motto more and more lately.  Have working really hard on Indigo Heart in the past week (77 pages in one week… and though they need to be brushed and polished a bit, I can truly say ‘no bad writing’).

In part, it was the reason I almost past up The Harlequin by Laurell . Hamilton when I was in the book store last week.  Like many, I feel in love with Anita Blake and all her undead and furry friends over the last fifteen books.  Over the last two or three I had become increasingly disenchanted.   Though I wasn’t real happy with the evolution and resolution of the last couple projects, I felt as though the characters were my friends, and just had to give the series one last chance.  Am I ever glad I did! A lot of what has been lacking in the previous two — the story, the mystery — is back. If I had one complaint it would be too see a bit more of Asher (I think he got a half dozen mentions and like one line in the whole 422 pages) and that the ending could have been a bit stronger. (Ha! another lesson from The Secret Window!) I’ve always felt that about these books though, that there is a wonderful slow build of action and then the end resolves so quickly it makes your head spin.  Overall, I was happy with the reading experience though and hope this is a sign of things to come with the Anita Blake books.

I had quite the interesting afternoon last week. I interviewed John Sinclair for BC Magazine about the rerelease of his book Guitar Army. I’ve mentioned political philosophies here before — that just because I don’t often talk about them or write about them, it doesn’t mean I don’t have strong beliefs. But it’s sort of hard to keep them to yourself when you talking to a person like Mr. Sinclair. So it’s a rare glimpse into a side of me I don’t open to very often as well as a truly intriguing conversation with him. At least that’s what I thought.

Also, remember to keep up to date on the General Hospital Recaps and Spoilers by clicking on the appropriate links in the sidebar.