King update; Blue & Gold 2009

First, an update on King. (this is an old picture, but definately shows the level of LOVE we have for this sweet old dog of ours!)

The vet is 99.9% sure that King has something called Cushing's disease. It's a malfunction of the adrenal system. Although his current haircut (umm...butcher job!) looks terrible, I'm glad we had it done or we might've never been able to see his big belly's lopsided shape--the whole reason we went looking for what is wrong! Basically, a benign tumor on his adrenal gland messed w/ his body's production of cortisone. When his body went into overdrive producing extra cortisone, it caused a bunch of symptoms. One of those is the big pot belly. From what I've read, lots of older dogs have it. Some may go undiagnosed, though, because some of the symptoms mimic things that dogs do in the normal aging process & pet owners may mistake symptoms for regular aging. You can read more about it here if you'd like to learn more. Anyway, the big thing is that it's treatable with medicine! The doc is waiting for 1 final bloodtest to come back before determining which medicine is needed to get this under control. We will then take all the results back to our regular vet & let him find us the best price on it at local pharmacies. (It's a people-medicine, so we'll be able to get it at Walgreen's or CVS, etc.) My mom also did some reading about Cushing's in a natural remedies book & found that, at least in humans, you can also treat Cushing's with a variety of vitamins & homeopathic things, so we might give that a shot as well if the vet says it would be OK. I figure he will be OK with it, assuming there isn't anything that would be HARMFUL to a dog. After all, at this point, if it's not HARMFUL, why not give it a shot? I guess we'll see!

Tonight was Samuel's Cub Scout Blue & Gold ceremony. Here he is, in uniform. Doesn't he look nice?

The Blue & Gold is the annual awards ceremony for Cub Scouts. It's always so sweet to see the little guys receive their awards....and then watching the 2nd year Webelos bridge over to Boy Scouts is pretty cool. It always makes me tear up when I see them bring out the bridge for the boys to walk across. I know it's a rite of passage that I never went through myself (heck, I was never even a girl scout...I thought they were dorks!), but it's exciting to see the little ones promote up to Boy Scouts! Sam will be there in 2 more years!! Samuel is finishing up his year as a Bear, so tonight he got to pin me & he received several awards (patches). Way to go little man!

These are all the Bears in our pack. (Samuel's the only one in khakis so it shouldn't be hard to pick him out!)

We tried to get a shot of him pinning me, but the picture turned out bad. When I got back to the table, Sarah took a picture of the mother's necklace/ribbon I wear for the Blue & Gold each year. The new pin is at the very top.

One last picture....mama & her little Bear cub!