The Day We Have Been Dreading For Many Years

We had one of the worst weeks ever after we got back from the Grand Canyon. It started with this awful sickness that cycled through everyone in the family except me. The boys had it while we were at the Grand Canyon. Ashley had it for the trip home and the few days following. Then Danny caught it and was out of work for 3 days because of it. And Alyssa was the last one to unfortunately get it. We had hoped that she would stay healthy since she had her Fiddler on the Roof play that weekend. No such luck. She had to perform, headache, fever, and all. Then, on Friday, Casey got sick. It started in the middle of the night. Camden woke me up around 3:30 in the morning and refused to go back to his bed. So we headed downstairs in order to let everyone else continue sleeping. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I heard a strange sound coming from the kitchen. It sounded like there was an animal growling. As I walked closer to investigate, I found Casey on the kitchen floor having a seizure. I ran to him and pet him and called his name, but he was unresponsive. So I woke up Danny. By the time we got back downstairs, he was done with the seizure, but was still panting and not able to get up. When he finally did get up, he was obviously disoriented and not doing well. Danny found an animal hospital that was open all night and we called them to see what we should do. After talking to them, we felt better about waiting it out until morning to take him to our normal vet. That is, until he started having another seizure. Danny held him until he was done and then carried him out to his truck and took him to the overnight animal hospital. After being examined by the vet, we learned that he had a brain tumor that was causing the seizures. They couldn't get him to take medication, so they put an IV in with the hopes of getting the seizures under control so that we could take him home. They held him there all day on the IV, but he continued to have the seizures pretty regularly. Around 4:30 that afternoon Danny called and told me to bring the kids to the vet so that we could say goodbye. That was probably the hardest thing we have ever had to do in our lives. It was hard enough to say goodbye to our sweet dog, but the time between when I found out that Casey was dying and when we would actually get to the vet and tell the kids broke my heart. I didn't want to shatter their world.

We spent 1-2 hours in a private room at the vet saying goodbye. We cried, we hugged him, we talked to him, and shared our favorite stories about him. When it was getting late and we felt like we were just delaying the inevitable, I took the kids to get dinner and ice cream while Danny stayed with Casey. He died about 30 minutes after we left.
We have had a hard time adjusting to life with out Casey, but we continue to go on. I don't know how long we will continue to look at the back door for him or think of him every time we have leftover food or when food falls on the floor, but I imagine it will be a long time before any of those thoughts go away. We lost him a couple of years earlier than we expected and because it happened so suddenly, I think it has hit us harder than expected. Danny and I had started to dread this day a few years ago when we saw how attached the kids were to Casey, especially Ashley. We had pictured in our minds watching him grow old and seeing his health gradually get worse. I don't think any of the scenarios we pictured resembled this day. We will always miss him. Here are some of our favorite pictures from his life.

 

 

That last one was taken during our family photo shoot a few weeks before we died. We are so glad we decided to bring him to the photo shoot because now we have some great pictures to remember him by. We will always miss Casey. He was the best dog we could have ever asked for.

Family Photo Shoot

A family photo shoot is a hard thing to blog about because I love every one of the pictures we got back from our photographer. A day or two before the photo shoot, I asked the photographer if we could add Casey to some of our pictures. We had never taken professional photos with him in the shots and the photographer was able to get some good shots with him in them. Here are some of our favorites from the shoot.

 

We did the shoot on the trails pretty much across the street from our house. Our photographer also lives on our street. It was close, super convenient, and the weather actually cooperated. The only hitches were that the boys were done after the first pose and there was this boy that decided to ride by two different times with his dog(he was on a scooter or skates or something) and Casey decided to chase them down the second time breaking his collar in the process. After a few words from Danny, we didn't see the boy again. Our photographer wasn't happy with the results of the boys single head shots, so she let us come back a second time with just them and try again. The pictures of the boys above are from the second shoot with them. If you look closely, you will notice that they actually switched outfits from the original shoot(out of convenience).

Grand Canyon For Fall Break

For Fall break, we took a trip to the Grand Canyon. We have been looking forward to this trip for 2 years. We weren't able to make it to the Grand Canyon when Alyssa had her fourth grade National Parks pass, so we knew it was one of the first National Parks we wanted to visit when Ashley was in fourth grade. We decided to visit the south rim and quickly learned that because of how long the drive is and the lack of campgrounds close to the park that it would be better to go without our camper this time. We found a vacation rental near Williams, AZ that was big enough to sleep up to 10 people. We decided to invite Brian's family to join us and we were so glad we did. The kids always get along so well together and this trip was no exception. Having cousins around, made all of the walking and hiking a lot more fun for all of us.
We started off our explorations walking along the rim trail. We let the kids get close to the edge, only when there was a railing.

We brought the GoPro along and had fun figuring out how to take group pictures with our selfie stick.

These next two pictures were taken at the desert view tower located on the southeast side of the grand canyon. It was a long drive out there, but we were so glad we made the trip. We were allowed to climb up to the top of this tower and see the views. It was pretty amazing.

The kids had as much fun climbing fun trees and sitting on interesting logs and benches as they did looking at the big hole in the ground.

 It sure had some amazing views.

Our cabin was nice. The kids especially loved this porch swing and the fun games(including Corn hole and Chess).

On day 2 in the park, we decided to attempt a hike down into the canyon. I had researched hikes beforehand and decided that the most recommended hike was Bright Angel Trail. So that is the one we hiked. I was so nervous, at first, because the trail was not nearly wide enough and the drop off was so steep and far. But after hiking for a bit, I decided that I either got used to the drop off, or it wasn't nearly as steep as we hiked further down. We made it to this tunnel pretty quickly and had the goal of turning around at the second tunnel(which the sign claimed was about 3/4 of a mile from the trail head).

 Ashley and Lydi were not happy about this "no dogs" sign.

We never made it to that second tunnel for fear that the kids would not make it back to the top. As it was, we had to leave Alyssa sitting on the side of the trail. She was a little more affected by the heights than the rest of us and had headaches and upset stomach pains because of the sheer cliff drop offs. The kids did great and we all made it back to the top without too much difficulty. I had to carry Camden most of the way, but Tyler walked almost the whole time. After the hike, we had a picnic.

Shortly after we finished the lunch, we visited a lookout where we could see the trail that we had hiked. I labeled the points of interest below. The red line is the part that we hiked.

We visited some other lookout points along the west side of the south rim via shuttle bus, but had our experience ruined a bit due to a bus driver on a power trip who ended up kicking us off of his bus. We were kind of done with shuttle buses and lookout points after that.

Hermits Rest was the last site we visited. It was mostly a trail head, but the shuttle bus stopped there for 10 minutes, so we got off, used the rest rooms, and walked around a little bit. Alyssa found a book in the gift shop there that basically had different accounts of people who had died at the grand canyon. She commented that she wanted to read and not read the book. She was interested to know how many had died there and how, but didn't want to scare herself by reading it.
We got off the shuttle back at the first stop where we got on and were glad to be done with the shuttles. I thought it was cute seeing these little boys hold each others hands.

Brian and Maryn headed back to the cabin after that, but we stuck around a little longer to finish up the kids Junior Ranger Program. I think this is the 3rd or 4th Junior Ranger badge that they have earned. Camden missed out on earning his because he fell asleep.

Overall, it was a fun trip. We were glad that we finally made it there with our kids. We were especially glad that we had Brian and Maryn and family there to enjoy the weekend with us.