A Tribute To The Guys Who Poop On My Floors

We've always had animals.  My first pet growing up was a cocker spaniel named Toby.  I don't remember him at all.  Then there was Sue, she was a black lab.  She was awesome!  After Sue came Bonnie.  Bonnie was the BEST DOG EVER!!!  She was a mutt, but she looked a lot like an Australian Shepherd, and man, could that dog run!  When I tell my kids stories about her, she could also climb trees and fly...because seriously, she practically could.  She was the kind of dog that every kid should get to have, and she loved me tons!  She lived to be 15! 

When I moved out on my own and in with the hubs, we almost immediately got a hedgehog.  Moral to this sentence:  don't get hedgehogs; they suck.  Then we went and got a cat.  A black cat, and we called him Scooter.  When we got Scooter de-clawed (dear animal cruelty people: I now know that it is WRONG to declaw and I would never do it again, and here's why:) he had some kind of weird reaction to te declaw and the skin on his paws kind of...fell off.  He healed and everything, but all the time in the vet made him a little weird with people, and so now, he's 13 and really only likes me and hubs.  Which means we don't see much of him unless we're sleeping and he's standing on my face. 

Then we got Emma.  Emma was an adult tortoiseshell, and she was kind of a badass.  She and I didn't really get along.  She did have claws and she destroyed EVERYTHING.  I'm pretty sure she was trying to make up for all the damage Scooter couldn't do.  People used to say "oh, get a water bottle and spray her when she claws things!"  Yeah, she wasn't stupid.  I never saw that cat claw a single thing, ever.  And yet every piece of furniture I owned was shredded.  Go figure.  She died of kitty cancer.  I was surprisingly sad about it, considering I didn't really care for her much.

Last, and most beloved is Simon.  He's a shih tzu.  He's 11, and he's blind.  We're his seeing-eye-people!  I got him when he was 12 weeks old, and I would have told you I would never be able to love a child as much as I loved him...until I had children.  But still, I love the little dude.  I am totally his person.  He really doesn't care about anyone but me, and I kinda like that.