Stress and a Good-bye

The day at the Attachment Center was incredibly draining to both JD and I. I'm not sure why, as we only sat around, played with her, and racked our brains to answer hundreds of questions (while being video-taped,) but it was much more exhausting than working in the yard all day. While I am super-optimistic in treating her while she is so young, the stress of parenting her (and my other super-high-demand child) is really draining me right now. Some nights I go to bed and think that I'm not sure how I'll get up and repeat the cycle again the next day. JD is traveling all next week and the word dread doesn't do justice to my anticipation of parenting alone all week.


We decided to not put the children in swim-team this summer; coupled with the fact that soccer just ended, I feel like I need to (and can) really focus on our "special needs" and improve them before we begin another school year.


Unfortunately, we were forced to make a hard, hard decision yesterday as well. We had to put our beloved dog, Reagan, to sleep. Reagan was a super, super protector of the children and our only real watch-dog. She once fought off two roaming pit-bulls when they attacked our baby goat. She daily guarded the chickens against the many foxes that wait for a free lunch opportunity. Most importantly, she hasn't left the children's sides the many hours that they have played outside. The problem is that in her quest to protect, she has gone to our neighbors that breed labs and attacked their dogs anytime our children have gone anywhere near their house. In her warped way, she sees their dogs as a threat to her kids. Because of this, we have spent months from even walking to our mail-box; but the reality is that we feel we are one slip-up from a law-suit because of her. While that was hard enough, Reagan has always suffered extreme fear of thunder-storms. She literally ate the door-ways, etc, of our old home during bad storms. Unfortunately, that took a turn for the worse during the storm the other night and she ate through the dryer vent and siding of the house. Knowing her pattern, once she started on this house, she would have done thousands of dollars damage in just one season of thunder storms. When we have tried letting her in during the storms, it presented a whole other range of issues. So, in light of procrastinating on the unavoidable, JD and Gabriel took her to the vet yesterday to be put to sleep. We then buried her next to our other long loved dog, Roosevelt.

I have no interest in replacing her at this point, but Lincoln does not measure up in the watch-dog department. He is very timid as we assume he was abused being he was dumped on our road. So, we will have to see how it goes without a true watch-dog.




Good-bye girl, you will be missed!