Puppy Pick-up Day!! Bringing Home Millie!

Get ready for a lot of puppy pictures!!

Finally, after what seemed like the longest wait ever, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Trent and I along with his parents and his sister's family, made the little over an hour trip to pick up Millie and her sister Maizie to join our families forever!

We walked into the house and they had both of the puppies out and ready for us. They handed Millie to me right away and I almost started crying because it was so crazy that the day was here and we were taking her home! 

The puppies just walked around and checked everyone out while we talked with the breeders and asked some questions.

Before long, it was time for us to head out and take the puppies with us!

The ride home started out with Millie being quite a bit squirmy, but eventually, she fell asleep on my lap and was just as cute as ever!

We made a brief stop at Trent's parents' house on our way towards home, and Mattie and Millie got to meet for the first time. Mattie wanted nothing to do with Millie and would run away and/or growl any time she got close. That sure made me think that their road to being best friends was going to be a little rougher than I had originally thought!

Mattie running away from Millie

Here's a few videos from when we got there to pick them up and Millie, Mattie, and Casey playing at Trent's parent's house. Sorry for the not so great focused camera work!! And for my talking and laughing!

We made one final stop at Trent's sister's house, where the puppies got to hang out for a little while and we all had a quick supper. It was quite a revolving door with there being four dogs there and two of them being puppies. There was always some dog that needed to go outside to take care of business!

Millie on the left and Maizie on the right

The two hour trip home to our house was pretty uneventful. Millie slept most of the time, which was nice so I didn't have to worry about her moving around and possibly peeing on me! :)

Our first night was pretty interesting. We didn't do very good at introducing Millie to her kennel where she was going to sleep, so when we put her in there, she screamed bloody murder. It was pretty horrible! I looked at Trent and said, "This is way worse than I thought it was going to be!"

Luckily that didn't last very long. After she cried for a while, we took her outside and then moved her to a little bigger kennel and tried again. She only cried for a short while and then she went to sleep. That first night, we were up between every 45 minutes to 2 hours, which was a little exhausting. Thankfully, Trent's parents had come with us to our house, so they watched Millie in the morning after they got up and we both slept for a few hours without having to worry about her! That was amazing!

That Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were spent getting to know Millie and trying to get her acclimated to her home with us. She had her first vet appointment here in Omaha on that Monday and everything went well with that. She weighed in at 13 and a half pounds. She goes back right after the new year, so it will be quite interesting to see what she weighs just a month later! She sure seems to be getting bigger each day!

Shes a lot easier to photograph when she's sleeping if you couldn't tell!

I am happy to report that Mattie has grown to be able to tolerate Millie now. Millie attacks Mattie every time she's around, but instead of Mattie barking at her and getting angry, she plays right back, so that's progress! They even napped by each other this weekend!

We're down to getting up just about once (sometimes twice) a night with her. She usually gets up between 1 and 2 and then she's up for the day around 5:30. On work days, we both get up at 5:30, and I'll get ready for work first while Trent goes down and lets the dogs out and feeds them, then I'll come down around 6:15 and hang out with the dogs while Trent gets ready for work. He'll leave when he's ready and I'll stay until about 7:30 when I need to leave. It's usually a battle to keep her awake until it's time to go into her kennel for the day, but we do our best since she has to be in there for most of the day. We have dog walkers come and let her out twice a day now while she's little, and we are so thankful to have them!

On the weekends, one of us gets up with her at 5:30 to feed her so that stays regular for her, and then we let her fall asleep around 7:30. At that time, whoever got up with her will go back to sleep until she wakes up again. It works pretty well for us, but I'll be very happy when we can trust her in the house like we can trust Mattie. We've got a ways to go before then, though.

It sure has been a struggle at times dealing with the unpredictability of having a puppy and with how demanding they are, needing your attention at all times, but I know it will be all worth it to have such an amazing new member of our family!

And here's our two girls from from a few days ago! Pretty soon, Millie will be bigger than Mattie!

Thanksgiving 2014

This year we spent Thanksgiving day with family in Sioux Falls. We all gathered at Bill and Angie's house for some awesome food and lots of fun (of course). Here's a collection of pictures from the day!

Before lunch on Thursday, we all got into several different trivia games on our phones. We all sat around playing each other and helping each other with our questions and really looking like we were super antisocial and lame. But we were having a great time. We are a trivia-loving family and technology was just making it easier!

Beautiful ladies in my family!

Deep fried turkey

An army guarding the bathroom!

It wouldn't be a family get-together without a picture of Uncle Paul taking a picture of you!

The Aylward cooking crew!!! Made the amazing food!

Nap time!

Getting the shopping strategy figured out!

My amazing hubby!

Our family who was in attendance

They wanted a family picture, but their dad was sleeping, so they did what they could.

When they pretended to be asleep, he woke up. Creeepy!!

Grandkids and Grandma! (minus Trent - who took the picture)

Look who's awake now!

And this work of art made by Kenzie!! :)

It was a great Thanksgiving spent in Sioux Falls! We went out on Thursday night to do a little shopping and then my mom and I were up early on Friday to hit up some of the deals at the mall. And soon enough, it was time to head to see Trent's family and anxiously await puppy pick-up day!!! 

More on that later!! :)

Okoboji and Garth Brooks!!!

Oh I have so much fun stuff to catch up on!!! I'd love to skip right to the cute puppy pictures, but in an effort to keep things in chronological order, I'm going to start back a little over three weeks ago to our last night in Okoboji and the Garth Brooks concert!

I had been up in Okoboji with my mom and Grandma for a few days and then Dan and "the kids" joined us on Friday night so we could all take off on Saturday morning for the Garth concert. When they got there, my mom and Grandma had food ready for them (of course) and then we played a few games. We played our new dice game, Tenzi, and then wrapped up the night with a game of Dominos. 

The best part of the night was when Dan ran out to the car to get the Garth CD for us to listen to, and we just happened to place all of the doubles right next to him so he would pick them. He fell right into our trap! He realized what happened on about the fifth domino. Alex caught it on camera and you can watch it here:

We all woke up on Saturday morning to a few inches of snow outside, which made our drive north a little more interesting.

Luckily we had a lot of extra time to make our way up to Minneapolis. There was an accident somewhere along the line and we ended up at pretty much a stand still for an hour and a half. That left a lot of extra time for games in the car!

We played Heads Up for a while during the traffic jam. When it was Dani's turn, she was doing the category where she just had to try to get us to guess the words by just making whatever sound that item makes. We were mean to her and we all were just not guessing anything, so she would be making noises and we just sat there staring at her and laughing. By the end, she figured out what we were doing and thought we were pretty annoying I think, but it made for a good laugh!

You can watch the video here:

Eventually we did arrive at our hotel with plenty of time to shower and some of us even had time to nap for a while since we knew it would be a late night! Jared and Kenzie joined us and then all eight of us headed out for a quick bite to eat and then to the concert!!

The birthday girl! It was nice of Garth to come to the area on her birthday! :)

We arrived downtown around 10:00 and got into line outside of the Target Center. I want to say it took about twenty or thirty minutes to get inside. It was cold outside, but thankfully not too bad! It definitely could have been worse!

We got to our seats by about 10:30 (when the concert was supposed to start) and then just waited for the rest of the thousands of people to join us!

Garth came out on stage promptly at 11:30 and played for about two and a half hours non-stop (except for the few songs that Trisha Yearwood sang alone). He was pretty amazing! Our seats weren't the best, and it was still amazing! I can't even imagine what it would have been like had our seats been just like 5 rows down. A.MAZING!

We sang along to every one of his songs along with the 20,000 other people in the building! It is just such a cool thing to experience! Garth is just crazy and all over the place. He sounded great and had  a great energy and he really didn't make it feel like it was 2 in the morning when he was getting towards the end of the show! :)

I have quite a few videos from the night, but not many that I'm willing to share! My voice is overwhelming in most of them and it is NOT pretty!! Here's the few that I am willing to share though! :)

Here's all eight of us that went! It was such a blast from the time we all met up to the time we got home! I love spending time with family and I'm so happy that we can have such fun and make memories together!

.Rumor has it that Garth is coming to Omaha at some point (he'd better not be lying) and I think we're all ready to do it again!!

Sunday morning we went out for breakfast before we headed out of town and my mom got to experience one of the perks of being 55 just one day into her 55th year! The SENIOR DISCOUNT!! A great ending to our time in Minnesota!