Saying Goodbye

On Saturday I made probably the hardest decision of recent. I took my two labs Maggie and Sugar to the shelter. It was something we had been discussing during Keith’s entire deployment. Saturday, I finally decided that that was the day. We needed to give them up for a number of reasons. I plan to start doing family child care soon after Maddy joins us and by the regulations of the Air Force family child care the dogs cannot be around the children. Maggie and Sugar would have had to stay locked up, in their kennel all day. They were messy, really messy. They caused a lot of extra work, work that I didn’t need with a three year old and a newborn. They don’t travel well and are difficult to control, which limited me in us being able to travel home to family while Keith was gone. I could go on and on listing the reasons that they had to go.

With all of these reasons I never, ever, anticipated how difficult it would be getting use to them being gone. Wondering about when and who would adopt them, if they would be sad wondering why we didn’t want them anymore. We got both Maggie and Sugar with the intention of keeping them for, well forever (as long as they lived on this green earth). We never got them thinking, well if it doesn’t work out or when we get tired of them then we’ll get rid of them. We thought they would always be our pets. They had become part of our family, like our “children.” Maggie was my first “baby”. We got her before Kate was born.

Both Maggie and Sugar are really wonderful dogs, and so good with Kate and Grace. They are loving and just really great dogs.

These past few days have been very very hard. I miss them terribly, but even so I know they must stay at the shelter until they are adopted. I keep telling myself that with time it will get easier. I also have a lot of guilt, guilt because I had to give them up simply because they didn’t fit in this season of our lives anymore. Guilt, because, they did nothing wrong, they didn’t bite Kate or act mean with her, they didn’t even chew anything. They just were making things really hard for no other reason than, they were just dogs.

So, in the midst of my joy preparing for Keith to come home I am also grieving for these pets. Keith was more than supportive of me taking them this past Saturday. It was something we talked about over and over until we finally reached the decision that we did. A decision, that never in a million years we  thought we would make. If you would have asked me 6 months ago whether we would do this, we would have told you not in a million years. Isn’t it funny how you think things will be and then God leads you down a completely different road. It is that road, that caused us to have to consider how Maggie and Sugar would fit within our family.

We probably won’t be getting any new dogs until after he retires, 10 or more years or so. I think having dogs when you have children is wonderful, for both the dogs and the kiddoes. And, while it would always be my first choice for Kate and Maddy to grow up with a dog, it just isn’t going to work out for us for a number of reasons. Also, it would be very difficult to find a dog to fill the place that Maggie and Sugar had in our lives. We’ll see where God leads us, and where he leads Keith in his career. But, I know it is going to be a very long time before we have a dog again.

Anyway, that’s what has been going on in our lives as of recent. Please pray that Maggie and Sugar will be adopted quickly and by people who will love them as much as we did.