For a couple of weeks now, I’ve noticed Anna holding out her arm toward Sasha like she’s waving. How sweet, she’s waving at the dog, I thought.

But then I realized that’s not what she’s doing at all! Whenever we tell Sasha to sit, down, or stay, we use hand signals. We don’t even think about it anymore; it’s just automatic. Apparently Anna has picked up on this, and she’s going around flinging her arm out in Sasha’s direction whenever she’s around her. That’s obviously what you’re supposed to do around a dog, right?

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We entered Sasha’s photo in the Conway Animal Welfare annual calendar contest, and she was one of 13 winners to get a full-size picture! Way to go, Sasha! (I noticed our friends James and Shannon have one of their ferrets in there as well!)

If you want a copy, you can get them at the Conway Animal Welfare unit, the police station, or a number of businesses around town (see list here). Cost is $5, and the proceeds directly benefit the animals housed there.

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We had our first Christmas morning with Anna at home.

Look—someone filled Anna’s stocking! (This was actually my first stocking when I was a baby!)

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Well, after having a few weeks where we could breathe a little easier, thinking perhaps we had beaten the cancer, it’s back. David found a small tumor on Sasha’s side, which is most surely another osteosarcoma, and the vet found two more on the back of her tongue, most surely the melanoma returning. The lab reports will have to confirm this, but there’s really no reason to think it’s anything else. Crap. Still no sign of a bone tumor anywhere, so we don’t know where the osteosarcoma is coming from. And the melanoma really threw us; we thought the vaccine had taken care of that.

Sasha still appears healthy and happy and full of life; she’s certainly not the old, sick dog most people envision when they think of a dog battling cancer. I think maybe that makes it even harder to deal with. Well, I don’t really know. It would be hard no matter what.

She’s finally overcoming her fear of cameras a little bit and allowing us to get a good shot now and then.

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This is one of those “I haven’t blogged in a week so I should write something” posts.

Let’s see… Anna can push herself from lying down up into a sitting position by herself now. Consequently, we lowered her crib mattress a couple of notches—she’ll be pulling up before we know it. She can do the soldier belly-crawl wherever she wants to go, and she can get up on her hands and knees and kind of go backwards, but she doesn’t really know what’s happening. It’s kind of funny—she looks at me with this mildly distressed look as if to say, “Help! That’s not where I wanted to go…”

Our other baby, Sasha, is still doing well (David wrote an update here). She appears very healthy, lymph nodes are still down, and she has no evidence of any more tumors right now!

We’re almost done with our Christmas shopping. Before we went, David wasn’t all that excited about getting Anna presents. He said (and he’s right) that she won’t know what’s going on, she’ll just play with the paper, etc. But then we browsed through the toys, and he changed his tune—he wanted to get her everything! We restrained ourselves, though, to two toys, a couple of warm sleepers in the next size up, and a few little stocking stuffers.

Anna now gets an OOY—Ornament of the Year. She helped us… er, watched us… hang it up last night.

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Anna was given a Fisher Price “Little People” nativity set to play with. It’s cute. It has baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary, an angel, a couple of shepherds, and then some animals: two sheep, a donkey, a cow, and… a border collie?

Hmm, that’s a new one. Never mind that the border collie didn’t come along until the late 19th century; I’m sure if they had been around back then, the shepherds would have had one. They’re excellent sheep dogs, after all.

So when I acted out the Christmas story for Anna with the figures, and I got to the part where the shepherds left their sheep on the hillside and ran to Bethlehem, I paused and glanced down at the sheep-herding canine lying on the floor. “But the sheep were probably ok because of this very fine border collie here,” I said, placing it with the sheep.

I can just imagine the angel saying, “Leave thy sheep with thy border collie and go at once to Bethlehem…”

Ok, I’m taking this a bit too far. Time to get back to decorating.

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Can you find the baby?

While rolling around on her floor the other night, Anna decided to see what was under the bed in her room!

Sasha saw an opportunity—she decided to claim Anna’s pink and white puppy for herself…

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When I got Anna up this morning, she started looking at my screen-printed t-shirt and I pointed out the “puppy dog” on it. All of a sudden, Anna started looking down towards the floor like she was looking for Sasha! Could she understand those words? Surely it was coincidence. But when I tried it a couple more times over the next hour or so, saying “where’s the puppy dog?” she would crane her neck out and look around on the floor, eyes landing on Sasha if she was there!

So my child doesn’t know “mommy” or “daddy” or her own name, but she understands “puppy dog”! You can tell what we talk about at our house.

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You may recall that Sasha was diagnosed with malignant melanoma and has been receiving treatment for it. We have just finished up that treatment with no signs that the melanoma has spread, which is great news.

However, just as we were coming out of that with high hopes, we’ve had another cancer scare with her involving a second type of cancer. David wrote about it on his blog, and he did a much better job than I would, so please go there to read the whole story.

We love this dog so much, and I just want to put all this behind us and not have to worry about anything. That may never happen with a cancer victim, but the good news is she seems to be ok for the time being, and we can breathe a little easier for right now.

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