Well, the good news is that Emmy does not have Addison's disease. But, we still don't know what caused her megaesophagus. The vet is not too concerned about running a bunch of other tests at this point, since 40-50% of the time they never determine a cause. For now, her medicines seem to be working. She has not thrown up at all since we started giving them to her. Hooray! She seems to be adjusting to her eating from her new elevated feeding dishes as well. However, most of the time she still just takes the food from the bowl, carries it into the living room, drops it, and eats it off the floor. What a weirdo.

Today Charles and I took Emmy for a walk in our new neighborhood. It is such a gorgeous day today! It was nice just to get outside for a little while. We really should probably start walking more often. I think it would be good for us. And the dog. And, now that we have a nice neighborhood to walk in, we really have no excuse not to.

For the past several weeks, Charles and I have been going to church at Lakeside Church of Christ here in Mansfield. It is less than 5 minutes from our house, which is fantastic. But that is not the only reason we like it. It is a smallish size church, which really seems to fit us. We really loved the small, family feel of Hope back in Abilene, and it was really hard for us to leave it. Ever since we have moved back, we have kind of been church hopping trying to find a place where we felt at home. It was especially hard when we lived in the apartment in North Richland Hills, because we didn't really feel motivated to get involved in a church out there since we knew we would only be living there for a short time. We went back and forth to Pleasant Ridge, but never really felt that would be our forever home either. Charles definitely prefers a smaller congregation, and I was just ready to go somewhere where we would put down our own, new roots. (Not that I don't love my family there with all my heart, biological and spiritual!) So we have been going to Lakeside for about a month or so now, and we have really enjoyed it. Everyone we have met has been super friendly, and the church has a nice, close-knit, family feel to it. Today we asked about joining one of the small groups that meets on Sunday nights. We figured that would be a good way to get to know some people better, and find out more about what the people of Lakeside are all about. The guy we met told us they weren't meeting tonight, but that he would definitely get in touch with us about next week. I am excited!

I am ready to feel more settled in life. I really haven't felt all that settled since we moved back from Abilene. I'm definitely glad to be here, don't get me wrong, but I guess I just haven't felt "home" yet. I think a huge part of it is because I haven't really established a group of friends here again. Pretty much all the people I hung out with before aren't here anymore, and even though some are, we are all going a million different directions in life now. I have made some friends at work, but at this point none of those friendships extend beyond work hours. I miss having a group of people to hang out with. I realize that now that I have entered "grown up land" my social life will look different, but we don't even have any other married friends here that we hang out with. Hopefully getting involved at church will be a good way to meet people and make friends. That's how I've met pretty much all of my best friends in life so far!

Hello, friends! I have not fallen off the face of the earth. We have been pretty busy the last several weeks getting the new house all put together! It is so much fun to have a house! Last week was spring break for Charles, so he had the whole week off. I took the week off as well, originally with the intent of going on a trip for our 1 year anniversary, but in the end we just stayed here and put the house in order. There are still a few little things left to be done, but for the most part we are all settled in. Can I just say how excited I am about the fact that I don't know when I will be moving again? It's really a wonderful feeling. I was thinking about it, and ever since I graduated from high school, I have known the next time I would be moving. Whether it be from dorm room to dorm room, dorm room to house, or apartment to apartment, I have always known when my next move would be. It is so great that now I can officially feel settled.

Yesterday was a traumatic day for our sweet puppy dog. For the last several weeks, she has been randomly throwing up for no apparent reason. It doesn't happen everyday, and she doesn't act like she feels bad, but for whatever reason, she just keeps doing it. We have actually taken her to the vet twice before for vomiting, but on both of those occasions she was throwing up like 10 times in a day. At first we thought she ate something weird. Then we thought maybe she had allergies, so we started giving her Benadryl. But yesterday she threw up the Benadryl as well, so I decided to take her in to see the vet again. They did some x-rays and found out what's going on. She has what they call megaesophagus. Basically, the muscles in her esophagus are weakened for some reason, and her esophagus is like 3-4 times bigger than it's supposed to be. Turns out, she hasn't actually been vomiting all this time, she's just been regurgitating food, saliva, etc. that hasn't even made it to her stomach. Poor puppy! So now we're just trying to figure out what caused it. They did a test yesterday for Addison's disease, which we should hear back about today. If it's not that, they may run another test to see if it's myasthenia gravis. Both of those conditions are treatable. Or, it could be that one of the times she was throwing up so much before her esophagus got so irritated that it caused this, or we may never know the cause. So, for now we have to give her Reglan and Zantac twice a day, which is supposed to increase motility in her esophagus and decrease acid in her stomach to hopefully manage the regurgitation. We also bought her elevated feeding dishes, which is supposed to put her in a better position for eating so her food will make it to her stomach. When the vet was telling me about elevated feeding positions yesterday, she said that some dogs have this so bad that they have to be fed in a high chair type thing. I almost laughed in her face. I cannot even imagine Emmy eating from a high chair! She would not be happy! But, of course I had to know what this looked like. So I Googled it. Here is what I found: http://www.geocities.com/bailey_chair/Page2. Hopefully we will not get to that point!