my growing girls

my little girl will be one month old tomorrow. totally nuts. she is becoming a real little woman. she eats so much these days and is so efficient at letting me know exactly what she needs. she is now sleeping so peacefully on my lap after her, like, 33rd feed of the day or something. but really, what else do i have to do? it's smokey as all heck outside, so we can't go for a walk. i can't really clean the house one handed, can i? and who needs to get dressed? it's sunday. so we're just hangin. we had a very rough night. eliana was perfect, slept like an angel, woke up and nursed and then went right back down. but her sweet sister, lucy, is having a very hard time. after three weeks of different diagnosis and various, unrelated, yet equally distressing conditions, it was finally decided that she had some sort of auto-immune disease, perhaps rocky mountain spotted fever due to excessive tic bites this year. the doctor prescribed her a heavy regimen of steroids and antibiotics and we thought she seemed to be doing a bit better. intermittent strange behavior, but lots of zesty, zany old lucy moments to counter- balance. but last night she started with the terrible pain whimpers again. she also was doing this extremely distressing frozen standing - like she can't move because it hurst too much. while the baby slept, jeff and i paced like anxious zombies, trying to decide what to do. each trip to the emergency clinic adds another hundred dollars to our growing vet debt. we gave her more meds and called the vet and finally decided to just try and rest (modeling the behavior of miss elie, the perfect). then lucy took herself up to the the top tier of the yard and lay down. jeffy and i were extremely upset by this as she always sleeps by us and never goes up there if we're around. it seemed so surreal, so strange.

now it's the afternoon and she seems to be acting a bit more normal. she's asleep on the floor at my feet, while her sister is asleep on my lap and i'm wondering why i'm not asleep with them both. i just never knew i could love the way i love these two little creatures. i never wanted a dog and now i'm so smitten with this mutt from lolo. i can't imagine life without her. and we have such big plans for her and her sister. they hardly even know each other yet. so if you read this (and it seems a few folks actually do), please keep a special thought for lucy and her recovery. we will see the doggie disease specialist tomorrow and hope for the best.