FMC 3.0

No, I don’t think I’m getting old. No, I don’t miss the salad days of teenager-hood - the people that say the teenager years are the best of your life must have really, really shitty lives after wards. I mean, school stinks, I’ve never gotten along with it. I like the payoff of working - the actual earning of something, not the potential that spending all the money on school will actually pay off later.

Anyway, that’s another rant.

Where aging sucks is in your pets. As most of you know, my family members are dog people. We’ve had 4 in my lifetime. Well, six, if you count the two my sister has. I realize that everything ages, but since the lifespan of a dog is normally 10-12 years, its a lot more tangible. The affects on humans take longer. You don’t see season by season changes in people like you do in dogs. Also, the effects of changes on physiology can happen more suddenly than it does in humans. I don’t mean heart attacks and strokes, I mean the long term stuff - cancer, congestive heart failure, kidney disease and the like. I guess its all a matter of scale.

Anyway, as I said, there have been 4 Raab-Long pups. 2 have passed on. We’ve had Sunny and Mousse for a while now. A long while. See, this is where aging comes in.

Sunny came to us with an ambiguous age. 6-9. That’s middle aged for a pup to begin with. 3 years isn’t a big span, but think of it in dog years - 21 years. Unless you use the new scale they’re touting, which leaves it as 12. Still a big gap. (The new scale goes something like the first year is the same as 21 years, each year after is 4 more years.) Because of this, we don’t have puppy pictures of her. The closest we have is:

That puts her current age 11-14. She also came to us half blind. However, age has its toll. Her hips are giving out, but she’s always at the top of the stairs in the morning. Her continence isn’t what it used to be. Also new to the list is a shadow on her good eye. She also has moody mornings where she doesn’t want to eat. She even has days where its pretty obvious she’s not herself. There have been a few scares, but she’s always bounced back. Yeah, the day she doesn’t bounce back might be soon. But thats why you enjoy the time you have.

Mousse is the only pure-bred 100% lab we’ve had. He was also the runt of the litter, apparently. (I wasn’t there for the selection, that was my sister’s persistence that made it happen.) Luckily, we have pictures of him as a pup:

I’m not sure what’s more interesting in that photo. That Mousse can be that small, or that my dad can have so much hair AND that it had a color.

At any rate, Mousse to is getting up there. It’s not always easy to think of him as old - he’s always been the baby. Though the signs are there. He’s grayer in the face. He’s bunny hopping the stairs. His first move each morning used to be to saunter into my room, and hop up on the bed. A few weeks ago he tried it, and missed. He feel flat on his butt. He didn’t make any sounds or motions that he was injured, but he didn’t try it again for a while. He eventually got tired of fighting Sunny for floorspace, so he whined at me until I put him up on the bed. It wasn’t until earlier this weekend he got himself back up there. Of course, he did it with no problem, and just like he never had a problem.

Their resiliency never ceases to amaze me. Of course, that’s probably mostly stubbornness. There will come a time, though, when he’ll need me to lift him every time. Just the same as there will come a time when Sunny won’t make it up the stairs. Yeah, its probably sooner than I’d hope. It’s just one of those things where you cross that bridge when you come to it.