The last two days have been big for Maggie.

First, the gifts. Maggie gets more mail at our house than we do now!

Maggie got an awesome new collar and leash, along with the pull toy shown here, from her aunts and uncles Christy & Justin and Gretchen & Brian. Right now, like all of her toys, it's an interesting thing to sniff but she's not sure what to do with it yet. But she'll come around one of these days. The collar and leash though get a work out every day, especially today which was one of her more stubborn days relative to the last few.

Speaking of toys, today we tried to play with the ball again by hiding treats under the ball so she had to move it to get the food. Not sure how that's going to play out, but it at least kept me entertained for a bit.

Maggie also got a package from her grandparents which included this stuffed (and squeaky) lamb along with some yummy treats. She was very interested in smelling the lamb, possibly because it was packaged with the treats, but we're hopeful she'll start playing with something soon.

Also, Kat pointed out to me that somehow I missed the very first gifts that Maggie received. I hadn't started the blog yet, so that's my excuse, but I definitely want to back track a bit, because these were all great. Her aunt and uncle Pam & Dan (and Bailey!) got her all sorts of awesome stuff. Bailey was kind enough to share samples of many of her great treats, all seperately packaged and labeled so we can go back to Kriser's to get her favorites. She also got two ceramic food bowls which are really heavy so they won't tip, and they come in a rack that holds them together off of the ground. One of the bowls is pictured in the 2/15 post below.

Right now we still have to bring Maggie's bowls to her since she's afraid to go anywhere else in the house - and she's afraid of the rack for the bowls, which is why they are always on the ground. But they are way better than the lightweight bowls we nearly got her, so these will be with Maggie for a long, long time.

Maggie thanks everyone for the great gifts!

We had to take Maggie to the vet again today. Last night we realized that there was a little bit of blood in spots all over her towel. They were all around where she was laying. We then noticed that she had blood in her urine (one good thing about peeing on snow), so we got her in as soon as we could this morning.

The vet believes she has a urinary tract infection and she's on antibiotics for the next week. Once again, she was a big hit at the vet. Apparently word had gotten out to the staff that Maggie would be there so everyone kept coming out just to sneak a peek at her and see how she was doing. She was very stubborn leaving the vet, which gave everyone a good chuckle that it was the first time they'd seen a dog who refused to leave.

We then cleaned up my back seat and got out of there. Oh yeah, about 2 minutes before I pulled into the vet's parking lot, Maggie tossed up her breakfast. Fortunately, it was just on the towels on the back seat so it wasn't a big deal.

While a the vet, we got the green-light to go ahead and give her a bath. You have no idea how excited we were to clean her.

We ended up washing and rinsing her 4 separate times. The amount of brown water than kept rinsing off of her was unbelievable. She was really good through the entire process and now that it's over we think she's happy with her new, clean look. Since it's now 13 degrees outside, we decided to take our chances with the blow dryer, which she also handled well.

The first photo is just before we started.

This one is after just getting her wet. You can tell she's really enthralled by this process.

This is after her first shampoo and rinse. This is what I call her "name, rank and serial number" pose, which we've gotten to know well.

This is after the total of 4 shampoo\rinse cycles.

And, finally, we have one clean and dried off Maggie.

I think the jury is still out on how happy Maggie is about being clean. While I've been typing since the bath, she's been curled up in a ball on her towel. That's how she was her first couple of days here and more recently she's been sprawled out on the towel.

Hopefully she forgives us soon... but at least if she's going to pout, she'll smell good doing it.