Our fur friend's timely departure

The evening before the twins were born, I discovered my pet ferret, Lars, had died in his sleep.  As sad as I was to lose my fur friend, I can't imagine a better way or a more appropriate time for him to have left us.  Lars was 8 and a half years old, "a venerable age for a ferret", as my uncle put it.  He was my first real pet after leaving home (excepting some dorm room hermit crabs), adopted during my senior year of college.  In his lifetime, I had adopted and lost 2 other ferrets and a cat but Lars had outlived them all.  He has been the one constant in my life through the countless apartments and 3 houses I've lived in, through numerous relationships, 4 different jobs, and 2 states.  Lars had already been with me 5 years when I met my husband.  Suffice to say, Lars was very special to me.

He-man and She-ra are born!

The twins are 3 weeks old today and I haven't found the time to make an entry in my blog about their birth until now.  Well, that's not completely true.  I've started to write an entry about their birth a number of times but I get too bogged down in the details that I soon realize are not interesting to anyone but those who are already intimately aware of them (ie. myself, my husband, and perhaps our parents).  To me, their birth was truly incredible and I feel as if I should be able to write an epic and moving account of it.  But the incredible thing about their birth was perhaps how unexciting and uneventful it was, which makes for a rather boring story, or at least one that is only interesting for a  paragraph.  So here it is: