Welcome to the Tuesday linkup I host with Jenn from Runs with Pugs! Thanks goodness today is a free topic, because my mind is all over the place this week. My husband and daughter have the whole week off, and boy… that would be nice. I have work as usual (although obviously not on Thanksgiving Day) and so many other things going on. What things, you ask? Read on!
I’ve realized that Charlotte and I are twinning! I also take thyroid meds (mine is for hypo, hers is hyper- but we both take two pills a day for life). I had conjunctivitis over the summer, and while I don’t have arthritis (that I know of) I do have some hip issues. So I can relate on all three of her ailments.
We’re still getting adjusted to her medication schedule. The best way to get her to take her pill is to mix it with a Churu treat. I’m not sure I want to give her two treats a day for the rest of her life though, so we’re trying to put it in regular food instead. My brother-in-law thinks we should just force her jaw open and pop it in her mouth- hahahahaha. He is insane.
For the rest of the family- my son comes home tonight! I mean, hopefully, if his flights all go smoothly (he has to make a connection which always worries me). Then Wednesday we will get our Christmas tree! We’ve learned that it’s good to set it up and let the branches open up for a day or so before decorating. This year I guess we’ll decorate on Thanksgiving Day? We used to wait until Black Friday, but I have work, and then we have a football playoff game at night. Then my son leaves again on Saturday.
What else… oh yeah, I have to cook a Thanksgiving dinner! It’s just the four of us, and my husband and son will help. But it’s still a lot to think about… salad… rolls… pie. It’s stressing me out a little, but it’s the fun kind of stress. We’ll do some of the cooking on Wednesday and listen to a Christmas playlist, while the smell of our tree wafts through the house. This is the best week of the year!
Link Up With Tuesday Topics
Welcome back to Tuesday Topics, as Jenny, from Runners Fly joins Jenn at Runs With Pugs to co-host this link-up! Please join us every week for a new topic! Write on our weekly prompt or choose your own topic! Make sure to add your post to the link up, link back to your hosts, and comment on the other shared posts!
Join us next week —> Giving Tuesday – How Do You Give Back To The Fitness Community?
Do you love Thanksgiving week? Are you cooking a big dinner?
If you have pets, how do you give them pills?
Top photo by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash
36 Responses
I gave a cat a pill for a few days. Very successful, but we had to use this pill-shover-in tool. Cat hated it. You have to be carefulnof thei cats jaws, so i was a little tentative. Then I gave up and let nature heal her. Thank goodness she was such a sweetheart that she forgave me. My current cats don’t like wet food, so I can’t use churu or tuna as a bribe. I hope I never have to pill them!
Your week sounds busy but fun! My kids and I have the same days off. I plan on putting them to work cleaning. Then we’ll divide up some of the fun Tday cooking.
Your cats don’t like wet food?? I’ve heard of such a thing but never experienced it. Have you ever tried giving them a Churu treat? I’ll be astonished if they don’t like those either- all my cats go crazy for those.
You have some exciting days ahead of you, Jenny! Enjoy it in full measure – I’m sure your cooking will go well!
Fortunately, you don’t have a throng of guests, which makes everything a little more relaxed. What kind of pie are you making? A savoury one? Or do you mean pumpkin pie?
No Thanksgiving over there, of course, so we (hopefully) have a very relaxed weekend ahead of us!
Yes, not having guests makes it much more relaxing! And the pies are all sweet- pumpkin and then my husband is making a pecan pie.
As I read your post I can smell the delightful aroma of your Christmas tree! We have an artificial tree so each year I try to go out and cut small branches from the evergreen trees in our back yard.
I hope you can enjoy every second of your favorite week of the year! Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, Jenn!
Thank you Debbie! Does your evergreen tree give off a strong smell? If so, that’s the perfect solution!
Oh gosh, prying Charlotte’s jaws open to give her a pill sounds like a death wish. It’s like when I hear about people brushing their cat’s teeth and think – wow, they have a very different cat from us! (There is no way we could brush Oscar’s teeth. We can’t even pick her up to get her onto a cat carrier. She’s a spicy lady.)
We get off easy for Thanksgiving as my brother hosts. I do have a fairly lengthy list of things to do for the veggie tray and dips + sugar cookies I am making. But it’s nothing compared to what my brother will be doing! Our house is too small to host our family. It’s hard to even host them for a post Thanksgiving day meal like we have in the past as we have so little seating – like just 1 couch in the living room and then a dining room table and window seat.
I hope Paul’s flights go smoothly! And that time slows down when he is home with you all! Will he be home for a longer stretch at Christmas? I imagine he’ll spend part of Christmas with his girlfriend potentially?
Yes, he’ll be back for Christmas, and then the week between Christmas and New Year he’ll spend with his girlfriend.
I think Engie brushes her pets’ teeth! I can’t even imagine it. When Charlotte was at the vet, the vet mentioned she had some tartar buildup on her teeth. Um yeah, we’ll just leave that there! There’s enough other things to fix right now.
It sounds like a busy but fun week ahead for you! We will also probably decorate the trees at my parents’ house on Thanksgiving — my sister and her fiancé are coming over the day of but will likely leave in the morning on Black Friday, when we usually decorate, so we might end up doing it on Thanksgiving.
I know it’s still technically a treat, but could you use a Greenies pill pocket (I’m assuming they have those for cats too, not just dogs) to give Charlotte her meds? My dog takes her arthritis medication in one of those pill pockets and it’s very easy, though I think it’s easier to get dogs to take stuff than cats!
I’ve heard of those but I’m not sure what it is- I’ll look into it. The problem we have right now is it’s hard to give Charlotte treats without giving them to the other cats, and the last thing Muffin needs is more treats. She’s just getting fatter and fatter!
This week sounds very stressful, but it’s the fun kind of stress. As you know, I adore Thanksgiving. This year it’s at our house, and we’ll have 12 people (two SILs + families). We divide the menu among the three families. Hubs will be cooking the turkey, and my only job is doing the grocery shopping (done), making gravy right before dinner (very easy), and making two desserts – apple pie bars and chocolate chip cookies.
I don’t know how much the treats cost, but if they make it easy to get the medicine down, I’d say that’s a good argument for giving her the treats. I have given cats pills before, but it’s been a LONG time. From what I remember, getting the pill into their mouths is easy, getting them to swallow it is not.
Stepdog hated to take pills and we relied on hiding them in food which meant that the longer she was on the medication the better she got at getting the food without the pill. For her final illness when she wasn’t eating Hubs had to learn how to force a dog to take a pill. I didn’t watch the process, and all that i know is it was quick but Hubs really hated doing it. For scale, a cat is about 10 pounds and Steppie was 60 pounds.
In many ways Doggo is a high maintenance pet BUT she’s a dream when it comes to taking pills. We just dab them in sun butter and she eats them like a treat! And thank goodness since she does need medication fairly frequently thanks to her habit of eating disgusting things.
Well, one good thing is tht Charlotte’s pill is tiny. So far she’l just eaten it with her creamy treat. I don’t think she even notices it. The real problem is that we have two other cats who always want in on the action. Muffin especially does not need to be eating extra treats!
Awww you and Charlotte having similar ailments is sweet and also a bummer! We had to give Leo some pain medication a few times after he was neutered, and we shoved the pills inside a Churu treat as well. They are the perfect vessel for a pill.
Yay, your son comes home today!!! How exciting! I hope all his travel goes smoothly.
I don’t know what they put in those Churu treats, but the cats LOVE them!
I am so excited Paul is coming home. And it’s time for the tree!!!!! Yay. (I won’t tell my daughter any of my blog friends go “real” because she is horrified we have gone artificial the last two years.)
There is so much work around the holidays for women. Sigh. But it is a fun stress in a way, and it’s worth it for the joy it brings others, I suppose, but I hope you find some ways to hit the easy button or outsource to the rest of the fam. And I’m hoping there are some deliciously restorative naps in your weekend plans <3
Real trees are not all they’re cracked up to be (as you know). There are pros and cons (the cons being the mess, the expense, and the limited time to have a tree up!)
Lol, it’s just a regular week around here!
Fingers crossed for a smooth journey for your son. Connections stress me out too!
Americans just love to create a frenzy over everything! This week it’s Thanksgiving, ha.
Good luck with the cat meds – that doesn’t sound easy. I imagine bitten fingers if you try to pry open her mouth. My son comes home tonight too! He lands ta 9:30 so hopefully all the traffic will be gone by then. Curly has a game at 6:00, and I’m bummed he won’t be here for it. Tank will come home tomorrow after work and Mini got home yesterday afternoon. I’m off to load my crockpot for our busy night and for some reason I wasn’t thinking about meals with kids coming home this week, so I’m crossing my fingers I can pull something together without having to go to the grocery store.
Yes- i forget about OTHER meals the week of Thanksgiving. Wait, we have to eat every day??? Hope everyone arrives safely.
Zelda the Cat is impossible to give pills to. We give her half a steroid every other day and half the time she finds it in her food and spits it out. That’s why we did the transdermal ear thing and she’d fight even that!
Meanwhile, you just have to put the vague taste of chicken on pills for the dog and she’ll swallow them down. She’s a good sport and I appreciate that because the usually things to hide pills in (PB, cheese, hotdogs) are not on the table for her.
I am just bringing a salad for Thanksgiving. And, if I’m feeling super duper eager tomorrow, maybe some GF cookies so my husband and his sister can have some treats.
They offered us a transdermal option for the thyroid, but it was more expensive and this is already expensive enough. Plus, we had a transdermal appetite stimulant for Muffin when she wasn’t eating, and it was actually really hard to get it on her.
Make the cookies! The GF people need treats too!
two young healthy cats. Knock on wood. But Churro would do it.
I love Thanksgiving food but unfortunately my hubby’s family does take-out… UGH!
I work Wed & Friday… and trot on Thursday.
You should be good for a long time with two young cats- they usually don’t develop these problems till they’re older.
What kind of takeout do they do? I’m just curious- is it Thanksgiving-ish or something completely different?
I’d like you to tell me if you’d like me to answer the 3 questions at the end of today’s blog post honestly, Jenny. While I don’t have an answer to the question that is right beneath the second image in this blog post, I do find this Tuesday linkup that you host with Jenn from Runs with Pugs to be something that enables you and other runners to share each other’s current circumstances. I also assume that you and Jenn work together to come up with the topic for each Tuesday.
Yukun, you can feel free to answer any questions that you want- or not, if you don’t feel like it. I appreciate the fact that you read and comment on my blog!
I’m currently living in Calgary, Canada, and Thanksgiving has already taken place in October. Now, what happens here, Jenny, is that I don’t find my workload or my routines in the Thanksgiving week to be any different from the week before or the week after. It occurs to me that one can either think that I love all weeks of the year, including the Thanksgiving week, or one can think that I don’t love any week of the year, which includes the Thanksgiving week. And I don’t cook a dinner that is much different from the day before or the day after, either. I actually also don’t have pets as of now.
After Lucy had her ACL surgery she briefly refused to take her pills (common). The only way I could get her to take them was if I wrapped them in a hunk of cheese. That worked so well she would come trotting (three-leggedly) over the minute she heard the pill bottles rattle. She would have ended up morbidly obese if it had gone on for too long. As for anyone thinking forcing it into their mouth would be effective? HA, I say.
I hate flight connection roulette – hope it all goes well. Family all together, YAYYYY.
Luckily these pills are TINY, so we’ve had luck putting it in the treats. The one thing we’re having the most trouble with is getting the eye drops in her eye, sigh.
Your Thanksgiving sounds lovely. I’m so glad your son will be there! I’m cooking all of my dishes tomorrow…though I may make my cranberry sauce today, because why not?
Make as much as possible in advance! I wanted to do some cooking today but… time got away from me. Tomorrow will be a busy day!
Sending safe and on time flight thoughts for your son! I so get the pill things. We had to try and get our puppy to take a pill last weekend for the first time and it was a disaster. We tried a pill pocket, cheese, hiding it in her food, putting it in her mouth and hoping for the best – and, none of them worked! We wasted multiple pills. So stressful. Luckily, it turned out she was just messy from her anesthesia because she just ate one up the next day, haha!
Oof. Another option would be to grind it up? But that seems like it could backfire as well- I would be worried that they wouldn’t eat all of it. Luckily Charlotte’s pills are tiny.
Open her mouth and shove it in there. BWAHAHAHAHA! Does your brother have any pets? He clearly does not have, nor ever has had, a cat. We just put up our (fake) tree. Well I did. And I put the lights on! Tomorrow (Wednesday) we will decorate it. The cat already climbed up into it, and then couldn’t get down. I really hope she doesn’t do that too much with the ornaments on. This is why I have to put the breakable photo ornaments at the very top. Do any of your cats climb up into the tree? And may I ask how much your tree costs? Elisabeth recently mentioned that a real tree (with delivery) costs $40 where she lives. Here it’s more like $150! I’m curious what it costs in Florida. Are our trees just crazy expensive, like everything else in California. I am so curious now what they costs in other parts of the country.
I am glad you have a treatment plan for Charlotte (although I wish you weren’t twinning with her ;)).
So excited that your son is flying in… I hope he arrived safely by now. Happy Thanksgiving!
So what you’re saying about Charlotte is… like mother, like daughter? 😉
I haven’t had to give either Eloise or Lila medicine yet! Oh wait, I had to give Eloise something after her dental cleaning but it was just liquid that I squirted in her mouth and she took to that easily. Pills would be HARD. I’d probably just go the treats route, blergh.
Thanksgiving is a stress-free affair for me! My stepdad does all the cooking. 🙂