Felix Family Animal Rescue

So the cat left us on Saturday morning. Wednesday comes around and Miguel notices a dog hanging around our back fence in the morning. He saw it had a collar on, but didn't recognize the dog. Dogs are not unusual in our neighborhood; we can see 5 when you look out of our back-door, thanks to chain link fences.

The little boy next door knocked on our door in the evening and he had this same dog with him. Miguel went outside and took pity on the dog and invited her in so she could eat. She drank a lot of water and ate all of the food she was offered. Her tag was from the Humane Society and she looked very young. She played a bit with Sarge and Sadie and I noticed she has recently been spayed - her tummy was shaved and her scar looked recent.

The Humane Society phone number was on the tag, but they were already closed for the evening. So we got stuck with her for the night. We put her out with the other dogs for awhile, and they ran around and played like she'd been there forever. Later on when we brought them into the house is when things got more interesting. She would go up to Miguel to get petted, and Sarge would bark this low bark at her. It was not something I had ever seen him do. She finally got sick of it and tried to play with him and Sarge and her went at it. It was bound to happen - they all needed to determine their places in the "pack." It sounded like they were going to rip each other to pieces.

She won.

Miguel was very disappointed in his dog. Here are some pictures so you can understand why.

She isn't even half his size!!!!

So after she positioned herself at the top of the pack, we had a heck of a time getting the dogs to listen to us because she didn't know the commands we use. Thank goodness I was going to be at work the next day...poor Miguel.

He called the Humane Society and they gave us 2 phone numbers, neither worked. So he called them back and they gave us an address. Note to self - don't give Humane Society my information because they will just give it out over the phone to strangers. After I got home, Miguel walked the dog to the house (just around the block) and no one was home. We ran some errands and tried again and the woman who took her from us gave us the feeling it wouldn't surprise us if we see the dog again. We figure if she shows up again we'll just take her back to the human society.

So we're back to normal with our 2 dogs and 1 kid.

Brief Visitor

Last Thursday was an interesting day. Miguel woke up and...well, let me use his words:

I woke up and noticed the dogs weren't in the house so I went in the backyard to check on them. I noticed that Sarge had one of Joanne's athletic socks in his mouth. I instantly got irritated that he managed to sneak it outside of the house. I walked outside and gave him the command "Out! - Out!" which for him means to drop whatever he has in his mouth. After he dropped the sock I saw it RUN across the lawn. It scared the hell out of me. Both dogs took off after the moving sock again and cornered it. "Lay down! Stay!" I commanded. I walked up to the moving sock and realized that it was not a moving sock at all, it was a kitten!

I picked the kitten up and brought it in the house. It INSTANTLY ran to the dogs water bowl and drank for about 2 minutes. I then offered it some dog food and it ate way too much than what a kitten should eat.

Luckily my dogs didn't hurt it, and in fact my dogs just licked it. It was kind of cute watching the dogs play with the kitten. Sarge was licking it so much that the kitten looked like it fell into a pool.

So Miguel took care of the kitten on Thursday, and I posted pictures of it on Craigslist and Freecycle on Friday morning. We had responses on Saturday morning and by mid-day a seemingly loving family arrived and took the little beast off of our hands for good.

Needless to say, 2 large dogs (regardless of how playful and loving) combined with our toddler and a sleep-deprived Miguel don't mix well and the kitten spent some quality time in the bathtub on Thursday and Friday. He was much more playful and fun on Friday so we got our kitten-fix for awhile. Thankfully there were no "accidents" in the house, and hopefully 2 days of dog food won't stunt its growth too badly. Miguel ended up with battle scars from trying to "unstuck" the kitten from under the couch, but other than that, we came out unscathed. Hopefully Josh throwing the kitten into the fireplace once didn't cause any permanent damage...I think he does better with bigger animals at this age, though the path to "gentle" has at least now been introduced.

More adventures will be posted soon...as we've recently acquired another "visitor." Stay tuned.

First Attempt at this

Ok, so we Felix's have never had a blog, so we'll see how this goes...

To update you on our family, within the last year we've purchased our first home, taken in 2 dogs and found out we're expecting our second child.

I'm now a little more than half-way done cooking this second kid. They tell us it is a girl, but we'll believe it when we see it, as there was no proof in the ultrasound. I have another ultrasound in 3 weeks, so hopefully we'll have some confirmation then. If not, it'll be a surprise! We still don't have any names. Miguel insists it's his "turn" to name the baby...we'll see.

The dogs turned 1 a couple of weeks ago. It's hilarious to us to know they are 4 months younger than Josh, yet are so much bigger and much more eager to listen to us! Sarge has hip displaysia and takes medicine every day for it. He is doing so much better, we aren't afraid of losing him for a good-long-while now. Sadie is as much of a spaz as ever. We've decided she is slowly recovering from multi-personality-disorder, as she is deciding more and more she likes Miguel all the time, rather than just every other day or so.

Our 16-month-old just doesn't seem to get time-out yet, but definitely knows what he is not supposed to do. We will keep plugging away at the time-out thing until he gets it. We do our best to just be consistent. Now the trick is getting him to eat what we cook. Last night he would have none of the stir fry I made. He made the greatest faces, I should have taken a picture. He didn't eat much, but he's still alive. I wouldn't give him any bread (a staple of his picky-ness). He wasn't too happy about it, but he will understand - sooner-or-later - that he's just gonna have to eat what we make, or he'll starve. We'll figure out this parenting thing yet.

OK, that's good enough for now. I've posted some pictures from the puppies' birthday weekend. They hung out with some other dogs while we looked on. Josh loved every minute of it.