This too, shall pass.

I cried myself to sleep the other night.

I got to thinking about my poor dog.  You don't even want to know the things I was thinking.  I don't want to put those thoughts in your head.

But as I tried to contain my sobs, I remembered something one of my friends once said while we were both in the throes of early toddlerhood with our girls and weren't sleeping through the night and teething and ear infections and one thing after another:  This too, shall pass.

It struck me the other day how Moko is just a memory now.  Did you ever sit with a friend and go through old photos from their childhood, before you were a part of it, and see a picture of a pet that is no longer?  "That was so-and-so, what a great dog."  Moko has now become that for Maraea.  She will be that dog that her friends will see pictures of, a pet that existed long before Maraea came along and not so long after she arrived.  Maraea will have very little memory of her, most likely.

I got a collage print made on Snapfish of some of my favorite pictures of her.  I'll frame it and hang it somewhere in my house where we can see it and remember her.  I'm running out of wall space.

I need a new house.

I want another dog.  It feels so weird not to have one in my house.  There are things I don't miss - the ferocious barking when the pizza man comes, trying to get her not to jump on people as they come in the house, fur, everywhere, fur, and of course all the health issues.  But her empty spot next to the TV is currently replaced by hampers full of clean clothes and towels and I'd much rather have her there, snoozing, than laundry that I have to lug up the stairs and put away.

I hear noises at night that I know, previously, I would have attributed to Moko rustling around in her crate.  I don't know what they are now.

My cat is going bonkers.  Twice in the last couple weeks she's been running around like a spaz at night, meowing and yowling.  She did that for a while after Buddy left us.  But I can't believe she misses Moko.

Poor Squirt.  The smallest one outlived them all.

But this will all pass and it will get easier, as everyone tells me.  I never in my wildest dreams, never had an inkling of how hard I would take this.  Never, ever, ever for a second I would have thought it would have been this tough.  I think I just always felt like we would have made the decision in our own time and it would have been to put her out of her itchy misery, and we would have been more at peace with it, and relieved in a sense that she wouldn't have to suffer anymore.

Ugh, you stinky dog.  I miss the heck out of you.  I hope you're jumping on people and eating peanut butter and chasing tennis balls in doggie 'kevin' with all your doggie friends.