Goodbye to a dear friend

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delays in posts....we've been really busy around here camping and stuff--living the hectic summer life. Benjamin is doing great. He now says Daddy, Stella (or at least a VERY clear version of it) and just yesterday he said "titty" about my mom's cats. We'll need to work on that one...but at least he's not calling everything with four legs Stella anymore :)

Thanks to everyone who sent presents or money for his 1st birthday. It is very much appreciated...he's been playing with everything he got and I'll be using the money to get his one-year portraits done and get prints printed from the past 12 months for his scrapbook. So thanks everyone very much!!! :)

Now on to the bad news. Andrew and I had to make the very tough decision to find Dex, our 5 year old puppy, a new home. Yesterday we brought him to the Dumb Friends League, a local animal shelter. It was really sad and we missed him before he was even gone. He had started to growl sometimes at Benjamin and usually nervously paced around him in circles, so we were attempting to prevent a possibly harmful situation for our little boy. Unfortunately, all yesterday and while we were at the shelter he was his usual angel self, wagging his tail and offering us much love....that only made it harder. We miss him very much and it will be a very sad couple of days for us. The shelter felt confident that they would be able to find him a good home without any children. I hope so. He'll be a wonderful dog for the right owner.

Thank you all for your support during this time. I appreciate anyone who emailed and tried to find him a good home. Thank you very much for that. You are good friends.

I hope everyone is doing well. I'll try and write again soon, but we have overlapping family visits next week that will keep us busy for sure. We are taking Ben and Grammy camping over the weekend, so I hope we'll have some good pics from that to post.