ryanandbernadette.com

Our family lost a very important member last week, our dog, Musketeer.  He was a very special member of our family and we will all miss him.  I haven’t lived with him for many years now, but most of the rest of my family has.  He was like the third twin for my brothers.  For those of you who don’t have pets this probably doesn’t make much sense to you, but animals really are members of the family.  Our cats mean a lot to us and Ethan just adores them.  You should see him give them hugs, he just tackles them and presses his face into their fur.  Those cats can get him to walk when mom and dad can’t.  Anyway, we will all miss our big fluff.  I know it can be a hard decision to let an animal go, I’m glad I haven’t had to make that decision for myself yet, but I have had to help other people decide whether it’s time or not.  It’s one of the hardest parts of my profession and can be very draining.  I know it is a blessing to be able to decide, sometimes it can also feel like a curse.  I cry even when I don’t know the animal or the people.  I already told Bree and Katrina that they have to live forever.

No, I’m not above bribing Ethan to get him to do something I want.  We’ve been working with him a lot on getting him to walk and just getting him to stand on his own.  I’ve known he is fully capable since he plays with his walkers all the time and maneuvers them easily which you can’t do if you can’t hold yourself up.  So tonight Ryan helped him learn to stand on his own.  We did it first without chocolate and only used that as a sort of reward since we know he likes it.  Then he was working so hard to get the chocolate we decided to use that as an “incentive” to keep him working.    It worked well.  I was hoping that peer pressure would play a more important role than it has since his friend Evan, who is a week younger by the way, has already been walking for weeks, but that didn’t seem to faze Ethan at all.  Hopefully that will still hold true in about 14 years, but I somehow doubt it.  So I can only say thank you to Melina for the chocolate, I will use it to its best advantage, trying to get Ethan to walk and then celebrating with it when he finally does.