..a little closer to where I am today..

..after we sold our icehouse and moved to the 'burbs, we decided to try to add another little one to the family...after months of trying, lots of hormones and medications and finally surgery we gave up and thought we were happy enough as a one child family...that was the trick...low and behold a few months later we were pregnant with Lukas..once he was born we finally had what we had been yearning for so many years..two children, a little daughter and finally a little son.

This is my all time favorite picture from Lukas' birth..his proud sister Sofia holding him for the first time..don't mind the fact that her face is covered in face paint from her visit to the Children's Museum just prior to coming to the hospital....Love love love this picture.

Not many months after that day I also wanted to add another dog to our brood, so Gus our new dachshund joined our dogs Bogus and Lou.

Since I haven't introduced Bogus or Lou before...

Bogus was a gift to me from Ventura when we had just been dating for about 7 or so months...he was effectively my first born "child".
Bogus went with me everywhere the first 8 months I had him...this picture of him is from when we where working on gutting and restoring the condemned house in the Heights, that eventually became our first home together, back in 1991

Lou came along that same year, at halloween.
His mother was hit by a car when the litter was merely 3 weeks old so we ended up hand raising him with a bottle and eventually with gruel..Bogus adored his new brother and they never did anything alone again.
This picture of my sweet, sweet boy is from 2009 a few weeks before he died from a tumor behind his left eye..what made this even more sad was that only a month before he died, Bogus had passed away...they ended up not even being apart for more than 30 days, while crossing the rainbow bridge..they truly were the best of friends..and even while writing this I am crying..two years later..oh how I miss my two boys..

Gus was given to Sofia by Ventura's brother Benny.
Benny and his next door neighbor got into it one day and the crazy neighbor ended up poising the dogs and the litter of puppies..Gus, his mother and father survived and that is how we got him...to keep him from getting hurt by the looney neighbor.
This picture is from 2009 as well...

and that is just a few of our lovely animal family members...next time I introduce you to our Pecker Palace....