Iris Win Streak Over, Freddy has bum knee, new Weezer!

Iris' win streak is over at 5 games, as the Mariners blew a 2-0 8th inning lead and lost to the A's 4-2 on Sunday. We think the good luck string was broken when we decided to leave just before the A's 4-run rally started. It was raining pretty good & the roof wasn't closed so we decided to head out early, since the Ms were up 2-0 in the 8th. By the time we got down to the lower level, the A's had loaded em up with no outs and then took the lead. Kris texted me that we better get Iris back up to the seats, but by the time we got back to the upper deck the A's had scored 4 times, and it was pretty much over. The Ms went down meekly in the 8th & 9th and Iris' unbeaten lifetime record was history.

Here's the Martel family at the gameLook - I found my thumb!

We had more bad news on Sunday as Fred the cat woke us up with a very bad limp - he could barely move & wasn't putting any weight on his right rear leg. I feared the worst, since we already know that he has arthritis in his lower spine, just above his hip. I gave him a good brushing Sunday night & noticed he didn't flinch too badly when I was near his hip, though his foot seemed very sensitive. Since our vet is only open Tuesday-Saturday, I thought that we'd take a wait and see approach and see how he was on Monday, since he seemed a little better Sunday night than he had been that morning.

We got home from work last night & he was still limping pretty badly so I decided to bring him to the emergency vet, which is open overnight when all the other vets are closed. I hate going to that place - seems like a lot of the animals that get brought in there have taken their last ride. But it went OK for Freddy--after a couple xrays and an exam, his diagnosis is just a $350 sore knee. They gave him some narcotics to help with the pain and prescribed lots of rest, which Freddy is only too happy to comply with. We still don't know what happened or how he hurt himself but the extra lbs he carries around most likely had a lot to do with it.

That's enough bad news. here's some good - Weezer has a new album coming out in June - you can stream their new single Pork & Beans on weezer.com - I like it!

Iris: 5 months old, April visitors, hospital visit

1. Iris turned 5 months old on Monday 4/21. Happy 5 months, baby!

2. We've had a couple rounds of visitors this month. Jim's brother ML (AKA Jack, John) and his youngest son Reed were up here from the SF bay area the weekend of April 5-6 , and our friends Lorraine and Rob from Ireland were here from Saturday evening until this morning. We had a great time with both sets of visitors. I'll post pics as soon as I can.

Here's one of Iris at last night's Mariners 4-2 win over Baltimore. Iris' career record at Seattle games remains perfect.
She's 3-0 at Mariners games and 2-0 at Sonics.

3. Iris has been eating more as she's grown, and Irene's been struggling to keep up with her, so we accepted the inevitable and I tried giving her some formula yesterday when I was home with Lorraine & Rob. Only I didn't give her a small amount to start--I gave her a full bottle of the same Similac (blue label) formula that she had a few bottles of in the hospital her first week.

It was a bad idea starting her off with so much formula when she hadn't had it in months--she vomited it all up & then it seemed that she had an allergic reaction to the cow's milk protein in it, according to her doctor's best guess. After vomiting her lips turned bluish-purple and the area around her mouth was kind of white and felt cool to the touch, so we took her to the hospital to be sure she was OK.

They tested her oxygen saturation level as soon as we got there and it looked fine, so even though it was pretty scary it turned out to be nothing serious. She also saw her regular doctor after the hospital & seemed back to her usual self after a nice long nap--see the photo above from last night's game for proof.

She's now going to try a hypo-allergenic version of the formula, which has much less cows milk proteins in that so we're hoping that'll do the trick. We'll start her off with just 1 ounce and see how that goes--more news later & more photos soon I promise.

"Thank you, your Holiness, awesome speech."

Bush said that to the Pope today. I just felt a quote that good deserved a blog posting.

here's proof that he really said it:

Newest Iris Photos

Here a bunch of photos of Iris that we took recently & have been lax about posting

Here's one of her wearing a hat that our friend Jana made for her

Here she is in the same hat ready to go for a walk with dadHere are a few more from her first baseball game on Monday.
This first one is from one of her few fussy moments
but she was really good & she spent most of the game like this
and this
and it snowed!
and here's Iris' impression of Cyndi Lou Who from the Grinch

Rookie Iris is 1-0

The Mariners won their opening day game yesterday, 5-2 over Texas. It was pretty cold (high 40s) but Iris was a good girl, not fussing much & sleeping plenty, so we were able to stay for the whole game. Lucky for us we were far enough under cover that we weren't snowed on. I'm not even joking - it snowed for 20-30 minutes during the game. Good thing we have a roof over the field here.

Here's a pic of the rookie with mom & dad after the game