Evie finished her summer camp at the community center this week and did pretty well progressing with swimming lessons. She now enjoys putting her face in the water in the bathtub and wants there to be enough water to be able to swim in it. I think next summer we'll enroll her the whole time so she'll get plenty of instructional swim and get out of the "Guppy" level.
The most difficult part of this week was Thursday when Seth and I came to the conclusion that it was time to put ChuuChu down. Churchill (ChuuChu for short) is our 12 year old pug who is now completely blind, mostly deaf, and for the last week or so hadn't been getting up off of the dog bed and had to be carried to the deck to go outside, and even then, she didn't make it off the deck to actually do her business. She would still manage to stumble into the kitchen for food, because she's always been food motivated, but other than that, not a lot of movement from her. We felt like at that point we were risking making ChuuChu suffer through life rather than enjoying it, that if she didn't follow us around or come seek pets, wander through the yard and explore the house, she probably wasn't having a good quality of life and was in pain. So Thursday night we explained to Evie that we thought ChuuChu would be going to heaven the next day and she should play with her while she had the change. It was a really hard conversation. Evie first asked why ChuuChu would be going to heaven and we explained that she is old and might be in pain and that she wouldn't want to suffer through pain much longer. (We had no intention of explaining the concept of putting a dog down.) Then Evie said she wished that ChuuChu was like "Mama" Gothel (Mother Gothel is the character from Disney's "Tangled" who uses Rapunzel's enchanted hair to make herself young forever). And then we talked a bit more about how people and animals get old and we all eventually go to heaven. Then we said we could think about getting a puppy, but maybe not until after Christmas. She said, "Maybe before Christmas so the puppy can use ChuuChu's stocking." Before she went to bed, Evie told me she didn't want ChuuChu to go to heaven and she said the same thing on Friday morning when I went to get her up. It was the first thing she said to me as soon as I opened her door.
But, Friday morning, ChuuChu stood up on her own, walked right out of the crate and onto the deck without any nudging or carrying, walked down the stairs of the deck into the yard, did her business and came practically bounding back up the stairs. She followed Evie around the house and then sat and let Evie read to her.
I couldn't believe it, it was like night and day. So I told Evie I wasn't so sure if ChuuChu would be going to heaven that day or not since she seemed to feel better. (We took Chuu to the vet and he said he understood if we wanted to put her down since her quality of life is diminished so much even with just the blindness, deafness, and general arthritis, but he gave us some anti-inflammatories to try and those seem to have helped because Chuu's been much more active lately, so she got a stay of execution.) Evie and I went to celebrate ChuuChu's extension of life with donuts.
Hopefully Chuu will have a little more time with us yet, though I guess it's good that we planted the idea that it will happen some day. I just hope when the time really does come that Evie won't assume that the same thing will happen.
On a completely different note, Evie really enjoys going grocery shopping with me and one of the things she enjoys most about it is watching the lobsters. On our trip to the store this afternoon, there were two particularly feisty lobsters who couldn't stop attempting to stab each other with their banded claws and Evie was absolutely captivated by this. Makes for cheap entertainment.
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