Tribute to a Dog..

So we've decided that we need to put the oldest of our dogs down. It's time. It NEEDS to be done, but it was an easy decision.  The dog has a tumor on his side the size of a golf ball. He's blind - at least half to full. He's going senile and he's HUGE. We cannot have a senile and blind dog around little kids. We just.. CANNOT. Plus, he's almost 10 years old. I got him when I was like.. 21ish. and I'm 30.. So he's 10ish which is pushing REALLY REALLY old for a Great Dane.  The thing that tipped the scale was yesterday the kids were going through the laundry room where their crate is to get to the garage and he snarled and growled at them. I'm not talking a little "oh.. was that a growl, maybe he was growling at the other dogs.." growl.. A full-fledged SNARL and GROWL. And to me, THAT WAS IT. The end.  I love my pets, but that's it. My kids come first. END OF STORY on that.

Now having to explain THAT to a special functioning 6 year old kid and a 4-1/5 year old boy is an interesting task. One detaches and has not let me touch her since the other has plastered his behind to me and has turned into a circus clown. To explain this euthanasia thing, I must admit I didn't. They are 6 and 4. We HAVE talked about it before in an abstract fashion because The Girl CAN understand it when it doesn't apply to HER or her loved things. BUT, this is not time for a "learning experience".  The Girl was sad. Of course she was sad. She's handling it very well though. I did have to go through it very very logically - step by step - why we are doing this and then ask her if she thought it was a fair choice, for us AND for Jake. And honestly, I think she can see why we are doing this AND agrees. She's obviously still sad, but can at least understand WHY we have to make this choice. 



Quite honestly when I mentioned how old Jake really IS, she said out of the blue how creepy it would be to find a dead dog in the laundry room. How how scary it would be if he snapped at her or her brother.  So we had the big talk this morning. The Boy on the other hand started giggling like a loon and acting like a circus clown and asking how much the vet was going to "pay" for him. Obviously that took some revisionary visits and a different approach. So, once that was corrected, he then started in on "tricks" to cheer The Girl up.

Conveniently enough, we then discovered that one of the cats was bleeding. Not a lot. Just a TINY cut on one of their paws. But by golly how I love distractions. It provided enough of a distraction that the sobbing subsided! Now, the cat is not wounded, it really IS a tiny, tiny cut on it's paw.

Soooo school is shot for the day and is clearly going to be put on hold as we are now watching Finding Nemo. Pretty sure after this we will be doing something else equally benign as The Girl is sitting in the fetal position in the rocking chair with her lovies avoiding an kind of personal contact what so ever..