A moment of reflection

It's late Saturday evening with two restless babies upstairs. Teething, as we're discovering, makes everyone a little cranky. It's also a hard weekend because, as we learned late Friday, we have to put our beloved dog to sleep. The appointment is Monday.

We adopted Hudson, and his buddy Yukon, in September, 1997. I should've known what was in store for the next several years when, the very next morning I awoke to find the largest pile of doo I had ever seen (as my Dad has been quoted as saying, "the bigger the dog, the bigger the doo" -- never were truer words spoken).

In the first year alone I chased Yukon for 2 miles across Baraboo, only to catch him when he stopped to gnaw on a deer carcass alongside a red tail hawk; I walked with a limp because Hudson had managed to chew the heel of one shoe of nearly every pair I owned; we got up in the middle of the night to let out Hudson who had diarrhea from the jalapeno cheddar biscuits he devoured from the kitchen counter (and you would have thought that would have cured him); and I came home to find the stuffing ripped entirely out of the new sofa we had literally brought home the night before.

We lost every piece of tupperware we owned and every new replacement, Todd was constantly without sunglasses and every stuffed animal I owned was rendered blind from Hudson's separation anxiety. And then there was the time, in protest of being ignored during a busy few weeks for both of us at work, that I came home to find a brand new 2 lb. bag of flour (stored unopened in a tupperware container no less) spread from the kitchen and throughout and all over the living room (including a rather large pile that, combined with dog saliva, had turned into cement on the wood floors of our new home). It took four vacuum cleaner bags to clean it up. And don't get me started on the numerous loaves, biscuits, and buns of bread that never accompanied our dinners.

You might be wondering why we didn't do more to lock stuff up. Ooh, we did. We did. But somehow the 110 lb. lab-mix was apparently part monkey and could get into, onto and through every barrier we could imagine.

We lost Yukon in January 2004 to cancer, and now, Hudson has advanced bone cancer. The sorrow of losing them is matched only by the joy they brought to our lives.