Good-Bye

Why.... hello there

Today Scott and I did the hardest thing we've done so far, we took Snickers to the vet for the last time and held her as she passed away, and it was medically induced. There were a lot of factors leading to this decision, but the main one was this: our beloved Basset Hound was aggressive. This confuses a lot of people because, I mean, she was a Basset Hound and they are supposed to be the most laid back of all the dogs, but this one wasn't. We don't really know Snickers' background, we got her from friends who were not able to keep her, and we're pretty sure she was from a backyard breeder, and we're also pretty sure she was a runt. Snickers weighed 35 pounds and that was a little heavy for her. Most of the bassets we have met are twice that size.

We had Snickers (or Snickerdoodle as we liked to call her, Snick Snick to others) around 3 and a half years, and we spent three of those years trying to train her to stop the aggression. It didn't work. When we bought our house her anxiety went up and the vet put her on Prozac. In the less then two years we've been in
the house her dose had up twice to the point that she was on the maximum amount possible. It didn't really make a difference. For the last three months Snickers' aggression had steadily been increasing to the point that for the last month she spent most of her time awake growling, snapping and snarling at us and voluntarily spending at least one night a week in her crate. Something was clearly wrong.

Snickers loved laying in the grass after chasing geese

When we talked to the vet about it a week ago she told us to give her a few days to see if she could find out any other information about what could be causing her aggression, but she did warn us that there was a good chance that putting Snickers' to sleep was going to be the best option. Wednesday she called us to let us know that she was recommending that we put Snickers' to sleep. She talked to all the rescue groups in the area she could think of, none would take her because of the aggression. There were no more medicines we could try, something was truly wrong with her brain. We could have opted to run a lot of tests to try to figure out what exactly that was, but the chances of it being treatable were slim. So we decided we were going to follow the vet's advice so today around 8:45am Snickers' passed away while Scott was holding her. It was fast (less than 30 seconds) and was just like she was going to sleep. It sucked, it was awful, but it was the right thing to do. Snickers was not happy, she was not mentally stable, and she was rapidly becoming dangerous.

One of my favorite pictures of Snickers from a couple months
ago. She had just finished eating a goldfish cracker without even
lifting her head up. Silly Puppy.

Luckily, Nico seems to be adjusting ok- it probably helps that he is completely distracted by the fact he is on the floor in front of us chewing on his bone- which is something he could NEVER do before because of Snickers' aggression. We do plan on getting another dog, but we're going to try to wait a month or two so that everything with Snickers feels settled. We know some people will not understand or approve of what we did, and we're sorry they will feel that way, but they did not deal with the constant struggle of having an aggressive dog and they clearly don't know how hard we worked with Snickers to try to prevent this exact thing from happening. For those of our friends and family who have supported us throughout the ordeal of trying to find ways to fix Snickers' aggression - thank you so much.


We love you Snickers and we are so sorry we had to do this, we will love you forever and hope that you enjoy snuggling up to Grandma, Gagoo and Dad Dad. Try not to steal too much of the pie that I'm sure Gagoo is feeding you... and don't destroy his trains.

We have a deck!!

We are very happy about the fact that we finally have a deck! This is something that we weren't 100% sure we were going to do this year, but decided that in order to move forward on the rest of the home improvements that we want to do, the deck really had to come before everything else. So we saved up our Christmas Club money, our tax return money and the money that we got from selling the red truck after we inherited the white truck from my grandfather and settled on the contractor we were going to hire to do our deck. 

The hubby and I still would like to do the majority of the home improvements ourselves in order to save money, but building the deck by ourselves was not something that we really wanted to do. The deck ended up being between five and a half and six feet up off the ground, and it would have to hold our weight so we decided that was something we just didn't want to mess with. So we went with a contractor that is located right outside our neighborhood so it local, and we really want to support local businesses as much as we can and they were just the best choice. 

Getting the deck installed ended up being a bit of a frustrating process, which was not at all the fault of the contractor and all the fault of mother nature. The week we had scheduled the deck to get put in.. we had rain, A LOT of rain. Enough rain that the main road leading to our neighborhood ended up flooding. Luckily, I have an AMAZING boss who is super understanding and had no trouble giving me additional time off in order to be home when they put the deck in. I did end up having to go into work that morning, but luckily Nico was fascinated by the contractors and didn't destroy anything beyond a box of tissues. 

As promised, it took them one day to install the deck, with the final inspection on the next day, so we were able to start using it immediately. We did decide to wait to really put anything heavy on the deck until after we sealed it, but that process will be a different post because it just deserves its own story, because sealing the deck has certainly been and adventure... and we're not done yet! But the most important part is... WE HAVE A DECK! 

Storytime Love

For a little while, I feel like I've been struggling to get the older of the preschool aged children who come to Storytimes (or Grow a Reader with your Library Classses) at CRRL to actually participate. I usually do action rhymes that encourage child participation, but don't require it. Today at Preschool Time, the Grow a Reader class aimed to 3-5 year olds at CRRL, I tried something new (to me).

I recently requested that the staff get a copy of the book Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham  so that we could look at new ideas for some of our programs and I am so very glad I did! I won't share the rhymes I used today, but I will tell you about them, and I highly recommend that if you work with kids, even as a teacher, you get this book! It has awesome ways to integrate science and math into storytimes also!

Anyway so I read four books, two of which I KNEW I loved to read, the others were new to storytime titles for me.


I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont
I absolutely love this book, and in some ways I think it's because it reminds me of Dr. Seuss. In this story, the young girl says how much she loves herself, no matter how many odd looks she gets, and says how what is important is on the inside. She goes on to say that she would like herself with purple polka-dotted lips, spikes, and porcupine hair, ending with saying I like myself because I'm me. 




I Ain't Gonna Paint No More by Karen Beaumont and David Catrow
This is another one that the entire Youth Services staff likes so much we have it in our special storytime collection so that we always have a copy checked in. It is a re-imagining of the classic silly song "It ain't gonna rain no more" and the kids LOVE it. Usually I just read/sing it, but today each time I got to the part that rhymed with the body part I paused and asked the kids what body part rhymed with that word. They did wonderful on this! The only one was what rhymed with "black"- the parents only had to help occasionally.

Again! by Emily Gravett
This was a new storytime addition for me, and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but I read through it and loved it so I figured I would give it a shot. Again! is all about a young dragon who is being read a bedtime story about a dragon who never, ever goes to bed. When his Mom finishes he yells "again" until eventually she falls asleep... and you'll just have to check out this book if you want to know what happens (but it's cute).


Open Very Carefully: A Book with Bite  by Nick Bromley and Nicola O'Bryne
This was my last book and was also new to storytime for me. I found it when looking for another book and knew I just HAD to use it- partially because it reminded me of the book There's a Monster at the end of this book. In it the ugly duckling is trying to tell it's story when he notices that there is someone in the book who doesn't belong and the rest of the story focuses on the Ugly Duckling's visitor and trying to get him out of the book. This is another one that was a lot of fun and the kids really seemed to enjoy.


Usually when I read stories in storytime I'm sitting down but today I tried it standing up and I felt like the kids had an easier time getting involved in the stories, so for Preschool Time and Alphabet Soup I might start doing that every time.

While I was pretty darn excited with how the books were received I was more excited about the songs and activities I did. Usually my storytimes consist of action rhymes that encourage movement but don't encourage participation and when I try to get the kids to participate they just don't. I decided for my storytime today that just wasn't going to work. All but one of my songs required the kids to give me words in order to continue the song. The songs I did focused on actions- so I asked the kids to provide me with some actions that they were able to do- and they did (with a little encouragement from their parents and caregivers). The next song/rhyme was about feelings and what feelings we have and what they look like. So we said the rhyme and I asked for some feelings and asked the kids to act them out. Some of the kids loved this, some were less interested, but I got better interaction than normal. The final song/rhyme that we did was about a dog and how the dog needed things to be happy. I gave the kids one example (a bone) and asked them to supply the other 5 items. It was really fun seeing what the kids came up with that would make a dog happy- all of them were very common, food, water, a nap, but my favorite was a mud bath. All dogs, LOVE mud baths. :-)

For the final activity, I usually put on music, give streamer wands or blow bubbles and encourage the kids to dance. However, I have noticed that most of the kids just don't want to dance so I used and idea from Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham . I got some easy animal riddles from the book, requested puppets that matched the answers from another branch, and encouraged the kids to figure out the answers. I thought that they would struggle with this and I was SO VERY WRONG. Most of the kids were able to figure out the animals before we even finished reading the riddle. I think having the puppets representing the animals helped. Next time I think I will include some other animals that might match the riddle to throw a bit more of a challenge in there.

After storytime was done the kids were obviously very excited and had high energy. One of the answers to the riddles was Crocodile so some kids were chasing each other around snapping their hands together saying they were an alligator. This was a very fun program for me to do and I think it was very successful and I can't wait to begin working on changing up all my other ones (except Mother Goose- ages 0-2- that one the babies almost always laugh so I think it's fine).