Eventually, life went back to normal—or whatever that was for us. Work, school, dance practice, baseball, cats, dogs, and life, I guess. After a while, you don’t notice how fast time is passing. We had some personal life traumas, and a few small wins here and there, and the next thing I knew, it had been 15 years since I had first met Asti. Brownie had been with us for three years, and Nanners two. And suddenly, I found myself pregnant.

I want to pause here for a moment to say that yes, I am aware of how these things happen, and no, apparently, I’m not great at planning.

Anyway, while it had been great for the kids (and the dogs) living in the middle of nowhere for the last 9 years, we were not living in a house big enough for another person, no matter how small. Also, I didn’t want to be going into labor in the middle of January, thirty miles from the nearest hospital, with a husband who was often gone overnight (by this point, he had a new job as an over-the-road truck driver). We had to move. And we were going to be moving into ‘the city’.

We finally found a place that definitely wasn’t perfect, but we were in a hurry. School was starting soon, and since Gus was starting middle school, I wanted to make sure he was there on the first day. Especially since he was going from a school of about 80 students to one with 600 or so. Also, I’d moved once while pregnant with Katie, and I definitely didn’t look forward to doing it again, so the earlier in the pregnancy, the better.

Unfortunately, this is the time when I realized that Asti wasn’t going to be with us much longer. She had gotten frail and was having trouble going up and down the stairs into the new house. One morning, I realized that she just couldn’t go on much longer. I took her outside and sat with her against my lap, and told her how much I loved her. And that I knew it was getting hard, and that she probably needed to leave me. I sat and held her and cried and told her that it was ok if it was time. And that I’d miss her for the rest of my life. We took her back out to the old house that afternoon so we could keep an eye on her while we finished packing up, and she passed that afternoon in the yard. We buried her in my parents’ backyard, next to all the other dogs I’d lost growing up. About a week later, I woke up from a dream of her running in a big, green, open field. Happy and running as fast as she could. I like to think she was letting me know she was ok. But I wasn’t. I cried for days. I still do sometimes. I’m crying right now.

So, we moved. We found a huge old house and moved in time for school to start. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a yard, really, at all. So Brownie and Nanners had to adjust to ‘city living.’ It wasn’t easy. They didn’t want to do their business while on a lead. And we were on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. I don’t know if you remember a couple of posts ago when I mentioned that Brownie had a tendency to run without thinking…twice she made it out the front door and ran straight across one of the busiest streets in town without even a glance, during rush hour. No thoughts, just running. Miraculously, both times she and the child in pursuit managed to make it home safely. Both times, we were able to catch her because she stopped to sniff something interesting. Thank goodness for doggy ADHD.

A few months later, the baby was born. My husband took a blanket home from the hospital for all of the pets to sniff. When I got home from the hospital, I took the baby and sat in our living room while my husband brought the dogs in one at a time. Brownie just sniffed him and looked at me with curiosity, then moved on. But Bananas. He very slowly and extremely gently climbed almost completely into my lap to get closer to us. He was so sweet. He immediately knew that this was another tiny member of the family that it was his job to protect.

So, time continued to pass, as it does. We moved again. And again, but this time to our home. We bought a house on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood, with a fenced backyard. Nanners and Brownie hadn’t been so happy in a long time.

Brownie had started to show obvious signs of her age. She wasn’t moving as quickly, and she had obvious cataracts in both of her eyes. She’d been with us for a long time. We began to mentally prepare ourselves for when she would inevitably leave us.  But instead, Nanners left us first.

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