Dog person

I'm not a dog person. They smell, they invade my personal space, and they don't appreciate sentence structure. I realize I've also just described babies, who I love without exception. Lend me a baby and I am a cooing, burbling idiot. Not so much with dogs; I do appreciate your love for your dog and its objective worth as a living thing, but it will not send me into spasms of affection. This is one reason you're a nicer person than me and have more friends.

My two dog-exceptions (besides your dog, who is lovely) are Daisy and Tulip.

Tulip is the little blurry blob in the lower-left, eating feces. Daisy is the big thoughtful sentinel, gazing fearlessly at the horizon and the promise it represents.

In December, Daisy died. She was old, and she had cancer. After strong medications gave her a couple more acceptable weeks, she stopped having good days, and we made the hard decision.

How do you euthanize a pet when you have children who are small? What's the proper way to go about it? Probably there's not a wrong way as long as your intentions are loving and sensitive and thoughtful. For us, that meant bringing a veterinarian to our house and saying goodbye as a family.

It was hard. I don't really want to go into it. Hopefully the kids learned what it means to be humane and what it means to say goodbye. They handled it more matter-of-factly than I imagined they would. But people's reactions in difficult times aren't always predictable. While Julie and the kids sat in quiet, solemn reflection, I doubled over and sobbed.