Dell

We put Dell down today.

She was born July 27, 2002 and died April 15, 2013.

We are all a very sad bunch.

She had not eaten for about two weeks, she was throwing up about every day, her eyes were not looking right, and she was losing weight. Her lump in her throat had also grown quite a bit in the last month.

I called the vet this morning and talked to her about it and she said, "It is time, unless you want to do a bunch of testing and spend quite a bit of money, but in the end, we may still not know what is going on. Honestly, it sounds like she has cancer."

Matt and I thought it was time too. I made an appointment for 5 pm. This was at 8:15 this morning.

To avoid crying all day, we got right to school.  I thought about taking the day off of school, but then I thought, what else would we do? Sit around and cry all day? At least with school, we could take our mind off of what was going to happen at 5 pm.

We finished school about 3 and Matt got home from work about 3:30. We spent the next hour as a family crying and sharing memories of Dell.  She didn't want to be around us at all! I think she knew her time was coming and while we were making a big deal out of her, she was hanging out outside!

About 4:30, Matt thought it was time to head out. We all gave her a last hug good bye and followed Matt to the truck and watched him drive off. We all continued to cry!!!

It was nice out, so I thought some fresh air would help us all. I forced the kids to get their shoes and socks on and get outside and they did! We played, rode bikes, walked, and then we all felt better.  Eventually we ended up back inside playing Mario on the Wii. The kids were laughing and being themselves again.

Matt soon came home and said he never wanted to do that again! He said it was one of the saddest things he had ever done in his life!  I told the girls to give dad a few extra hugs because he had the hardest part of all of this!

We ended up going out to eat to drown out our sorrows and now it is time to go to bed.  This is the first time in almost 11 years that Dell has not been in our house overnight. 

It will definitely take some time to get used to her being gone.  We can clean our carpets good now and not worry about her throwing up on them again. We can clean up the dog food that is all over our house in all our attempts to get her to eat.  We can scrub the bathroom floor from her throwing up every night for the last week. 

It is really a transition time for us.  Matt will need to fix the doorbell now since Dell will not be around to alert me when somebody is at the door. I don't have anybody to tell me the UPS, FEDEX, mailman, trashman, snowplow or any other loud vehicle is going by our house. I will no longer need to ask Matt at night, "Did you let Dell out? Did you let her back in?"  We don't need to remind Megan to feed Dell. 

I will also have nobody to chase the birds out of the backyard before we can go out there. If you would mention the word "outside," she thought she had to be the first one out. She would knock a kid out of the way to get out there first! I can picture her at the door, fighting with one of the kids to get outside first. While outside, she would always sit under the slide and chew on sticks while we played on the swingset.  She would also bark anytime somebody was on the slide- it was so annoying! So tonight after Matt had left, Courtney was on the slide and I pretended I was Dell. It made her cry! No more picking up dog poop or being scared you are going to step on some. No more worrying that she is going to wonder out of the yard and we won't find her again.

We had just had her at the vet a month ago (the vet remembered us) and gotten her all her shots and her pet license.  Her lump on her throat was not there at that time. Today, she was down 10 pounds from a month ago when she was in there.  We have an almost full bottle of proin and about 20 pounds of dog food left.

Matt said that the vet did a quick exam on her today and noticed that her eyes were yellow, this is a sign that her liver was not functioning well.  She also thought that she had cancer somewhere because her lump had grown so much in the last month. We wanted to know that this was the right decision to make and we think it was.  It was not fun at all, but we knew it was right for her. We didn't see her getting any better and the vet didn't think so either.

Megan and I really wanted to bury her somewhere, but we ended up cremating her and we will go back in a couple of days to get her ashes. We will probably bury them in the backyard, where she loved to be!!!

Poor Dell :(

It's not looking good for Dell...

In addition to her cantaloupe size fat-tumor under her left shoulder and her golf ball size blood-tumor on her chest, she has now developed a lump on her throat. We have actually been fighting this for a couple of years, but lately, it has grown and grown fast. In the past, the vet has always thought it was connected to a drain line from somewhere else in her body. Now it is about the size of a ping pong ball.

She has stopped eating (but still drinking), she has been throwing up at least every other day and now she is throwing up every night, she is losing weight, she is getting more lethargic, her eyes are getting really goopy and she's squinting. She is just not being herself.

It's kind of sad for us all. :(

Gang at the Zoo last week!

We had a chance last week to go to the zoo with some of our friends that attend public school. It was a great day together and I thought I would post some of my favorite pictures!!

Here was the whole gang! 9 kids!! (We are missing one little boy in the picture.)

 

First stop- the Aquarium! Gotta love those jellyfish! (And the penguins of course!)

 

Some of the kids ON the zoo map!! Yes, one of those is mine!

 

Hanging out on some mammoth bones!

 

Feeding the goats hay! I wish I had sound along with the picture, these boys thought it was hilarious!

 



 

Megan and her friend posing on the cat!

Just a super cute picture of Christian! 

 

The best part of the day was that these three girls pushed/ pulled the wagon up one of the huge hills at the zoo! They thought it was great and so did I!!

New Day!

It wasn't only me, but quite a few people I know had "bad" days yesterday.  Like not just crabby bad, but bad things happened to them.

I don't know if something was in the air or what, but I really hope today is much better!

I am reminded of the Christian song that is played on the radio all the time.

"He gives new mercy's to me every day, your love never fails!"

Hail!!

Wow, did everybody see the hail storm in Omaha last night?? It was obnoxiously loud and crazy!

The bad part is it damaged our camper. The same camper that we just got back from the shop because it had been broken into.  We no longer have it in indoor storage, but now it is stored in an outside storage facility about six blocks from our house.

As of last night, we now have dents on our siding, two broken skylights in the bathroom, outside lights broke, and our tire cover on the back is all dented up!

So we called insurance.  Another $500 deductible.  Matt wasn't sure if we had that much in damage, but he wanted to see what they would say.

They said that if we filed another claim, our rates might go up.

Matt is not worried about the dents in the siding, but everything else needs to be fixed and he thinks he could easily do some of it himself.  He said he might just call around tomorrow and get prices.  He thinks everything will be pretty easy to fix except the skylights, especially one of them in the bathroom. 

This poor camper!!

Airplanes.

Again, I'm finding webpages to use for science class tomorrow. We are learning how planes work, but why don't we dig a little bit deeper and learn about Amelia Earhart and the Wright brothers??

http://acepilots.com/earhart.html

http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/ushistory/wrightbrothers1.htm

My girls :)

Today I ate something (some marshmallows) after lunch and of course my blood sugar plummeted. I felt like doing nothing else, but laying down and taking a nap for about 20 minutes.

We were technically supposed to be getting back to school, but this comes first. Sorry girls. I don't function well when I can't keep my eyes open. :( 

So I saw a pillow on the floor and laid down. Before I knew it, I had two girls pampering me! They were rubbing my back, singing to me, reading me books, encouraging me to sleep, covering me up with a blanket, etc. They also encouraged me not to look at the clock.

Do you know what these two children of mine were up to??

They wanted me to keep sleeping so they didn't have to go back to school!!!