Friday Flashback...Pets

We had a sad thing happen recently with one of our pets...Our cat, Cash, was let out by mistake and he never made it back home. I have kept my hopes up, thinking that he still might come back; but now that it has been over 2 weeks, I don't think it will happen. (The girls miss him very much. The other day a cat meowed on tv and Justee took off to the door all excited like she was going to let Cash in. She was very disappointed when he wasn't there.)

As I was thinking about Cash, and the fact that we haven't even had him a year yet, I started thinking about all of the pets Justin and I have owned since we were married.

Our first pet was our cat Blaise. She was a beautiful cat with tons of personality. She loved to play hide and seek with you, and she would play with cat toys all day. We got her just days after we got home from our honeymoon. She came from one of my parents' cats who had kittens. (The cat my parent's have now is Blaise's grandmother.)

The second pet we had was a Bluetick Hound that I rescued from the shelter. This is Tatum:
I warned Justin before we got married that I was going to own a Great Dane. Not long after we got Tate I took the opportunity to get one...I told Justin it would count as my birthday and Christmas present. (We weren't even married a year, and we were about to get our 3rd pet.) So we headed to St. Louis to pick up Dirkley. Luckily we were able to stop in Kansas at my sister's house for a break.This is the day after we got Dirk...He and Tate loved to play.It wasn't long before Dirk really outgrew Tate.

Tate became a huge pain in the butt. She was a hound dog and wanted to do what hounds do...we couldn't supply that kind of lifestyle for her, but we knew someone who could. She is currently living in Ten Sleep, WY and is the best coon dog her new owner has (last we heard.)Somewhere in the middle of the pet frenzy, we got two rabbits. Bronco was the grey one and Harley was the white one....they sure were cute, but what was I thinking? Harley died in child/bunny birth while we were out of town and we gave Bronco away to a family we knew.Then it was just Dirk and Blaise for a while.That lasted until we went into a pet store...just for fun. We had no intentions of getting another pet....then I saw this adorable face. I have no self-control. Mikko was our fluffy little Pomeranian.It was pretty funny to walk a Pom and a Great Dane at the same time. They were great friends though, and Mikko definitely ran the show. At one point we thought we lost Mikko...I had let him out to go potty and when I went to let him back in, I couldn't find him. We searched and searched the neighborhood. To make a long story short...Our neighbors stole him and were hiding him from us...said they were going to sell him. Nice huh?

Here he is a little bit bigger:Dirk and Mikko with Kyle, Journee, Mark, Karlee, and Jada:We were visiting my parents around Thanksgiving when Justin had to come inside and tell me he found Mikko dead on the road in front of my parents' house. They live on a dirt road out in the country...I'm still upset that someone would be driving fast enough to hit the poor little guy and then not come tell us.

After Dirk was without a playmate for a while...almost a year...Justin got the dog he always wanted...an English Bulldog. Dozer and Sydnee:

You'd think that having a dog stolen would only happen once, but it happened to us twice. In our second home in Laramie, we had some crazy college kids living next to us...They were always having parties and after a particularly wild party, we woke up to find Dozer missing from our yard. It took some time, some threats and a police report, but Dozer was returned to us.

Not long after moving here, we had to get Dirk put down. It was very hard for me, but he was struggling. He wasn't the same dog after we lived in Alabama...he had gotten severe heat stroke there, and his health and his mind were going. It was the right thing to do....hard, but necessary.

Next, after about 8 years of having Blaise, she just didn't come home one night...That was really hard for all of us too. The girls really missed her so...a few months later, we got Cash.

Now Dozer is the last of our pets (if you don't count the fish tank) and I'm sure he misses his buddy Cash, but I think we need to just take a break for a while...we have had 8 different pets in our almost 9 years of marriage. I wonder how much money we have spent on pets and all their needs over the years...more than I'd like to admit I'm sure, but I can't imagine not having them in my life or in my kids lives...I think kids learn valuable lessons from animals...(Plus I think kids who live in homes without pets get sick more often (that is if the house with pets is kept decently clean)..I have no real proof on that, but it is probably out there. ;) So that's my story and I'm stickin to it.

Phew...that post ended up being much longer than expected.