The Rankin Zoo 

After our quick trip to California last weekend we headed up to Princeton, NJ on Thursday for my 10 year college reunion. Ten years… that can’t be right. Anyway, Princeton has a unique way of doing reunions and lets just say it’s crazy.

We got a late start on Thursday so we didn’t get up to campus until kind of late. To save money, and for convenience, we stayed on campus. However, the room we got assigned was between the courtyards where the 10th and 5th reunion were being held - at the stage end of the courtyard no less. So, there was loud, thumping music coming from both sides until about 2am each night. Not an ideal sleeping situation, although Coral seemed to do pretty well. After she would go to bed, between 7-8pm, we would load her in the stroller and walk around campus to the various reunions. She seemed to sleep through most of it - which is amazing.

Overall we had a good time at reunions and it was fun to see people again. There were a fair number of new babies there so Coral had good company.

On Sunday morning, after reunions ended, we packed in the minivan and drove in to New York City to go to a wedding. The wedding was very nice and we had a good time but as the day came to a close we realized we had really overdone it - for ourselves and Coral. At one point we handed Coral off to an old lady that we didn’t know. She wandered away with her and later we saw her, a few tables away, feeding Coral chocolate cake and strawberries - ugh. We headed out of NYC around 7pm and decided to just drive straight home. The drive actually went quickly and it was nice to be in our own bed that night, with no loud music blaring.

(First of all, I got way behind on the blog so I’m adding these and backdating them.)

B, Coral, and I headed out to California for a brief trip. We went for a memorial service for B’s grandfather, Julius. The purpose of the trip was sad but Coral got to meet several relatives for the first time. We enjoyed hanging out with B’s aunts and uncles and cousins and various other people.

We also stopped by to visit Aunt Carol and Uncle Ron from my side of the family. We had a fun dinner with them and they seemed to enjoy meeting Coral.

We were in California for only about 36 hours. It was Coral’s second cross-country trip and she did great. She seems to enjoy airplanes and doesn’t fuss too much, which is good. Especially on the flight out which was full - so she spent the entire flight on our laps.

We were happy to get back home to get ready for another trip the following weekend…

Coral seems to pick a sound and then make it the sound of the week. At first it was Dddddddaah. Maybe it meant “dad” or, more likely, it meant “dog”. Then there were a lot of Ccccccah sounds - maybe “cat”? She moved on to focus on the Ggggg sound, usually as a question, Gggg? Lately she has been working on the Mmmmmmaaaaa sound - often with the volume on high. It really sounds like she’s yelling for her mother.

–Andy

I forgot to mention that we posted two more batches of photos recently. One batch was from B and Coral’s trip to Chapel Hill to visit B’s mom. Coral had a great time hanging out with Aunt Iris, Meme, Aunt Emily, Uncle Jon, and most of all, Dakota!

There’s also a batch of pictures from the other day when we were all hanging out at Mimi’s house. Coral and Eva spent a lot of time playing together and a good time was had by all.

Check out the galleries by clicking on the photos.

Enjoy!

Last year during a regular checkup we discovered that Marble had a heart murmur. We decided to just keep an eye on it for a while since she didn’t have any symptoms of being sick. A few weeks ago we took her in for a checkup because she had been vomiting a lot. During this checkup we discovered that she had hyperthyroidism. We put her on medication for a couple of weeks and were due to take her back in on Monday for a follow-up check. Sunday night we discovered that Marb had a wound - likely a puncture wound from a fight that then got infected. We took her in on Monday and they cleaned her up and gave us antibiotics. So now we have to
give her antibiotics and thyroid medicine for two weeks before we can get checked out again.

Today we had Scout and Buttercup in for regular checkups. More on that later…

–Andy

Coral considers herself lucky that she has so many cats and dogs to play with. Here she is patting Misty. One of her other cats, Marble, is on the mend. More on that later.

–Andy