It's Not Good-bye...Just See You Later...

Well I guess you could say a lot has happened since July 1st, the last post I made. Let's start on the first weekend of July. We had a great 4th of July weekend spent with family and friends, went to a wedding in Davenport, and had a fun 3 day weekend away from work! The following week even though it was only a 4 day week, seemed super long, so we spent the nights just relaxing at home, having family time.

Then comes the weekend of the 10th. I decided I wanted to paint our bedroom, I mean we have at this point almost been in the house a year and it needed to be painted, so Dan and I took the afternoon (after he got off work) and went and picked out paint, then headed home for me to start triming while Dan mowed the lawn. Buddie just laid in the room and watched me most of the time. Then last Saturday we get a call from my mom, my cousins condo was on fire. Well if you know my family at all sometimes little things turn in to BIG things as they come down the grape vine, kind of like a bad game of telephone. She said, "go over to Uncle Kevins and turn off the grill." Right away I thought to myself Uncle Kevin is in California so why is their grill on? My cousin was staying there for the weekend watching the dog, and they left in a hurry to go to their condo to see what was going on. Dan and I headed over to turn off the grill then to see what everyone was talking about. Sad to say the whole building was a loss. To make things worse, my cousin bought his condo the same time we bought our house last year, and redid the whole inside, just to finish most of it up within the last two weeks, and his girlfriend had just moved in with him. So all around a very sad story!

A happy detail from that weekend however, a friend of ours had a baby girl, so Sunday after my 2nd cousins 2nd birthday party we headed to the hospital to see her. She is so beautiful! Now here comes another sad part. We get home Sunday about 8:30 or so, my dad takes Buddie outside to play for a bit, he does about one run to fetch his toy then he's ready to come inside. Which we knew he couldn't play as much but the fact that you could tell he really wanted to be able to play just tore me up inside. Later that night we notice Buddie's eyes were really red, we chalked it up to having been outside after Dan mowed the lawn. About midnight that night his eyes start to look funny and he couldn't really open them. This has happened before and they were always fine the next day.

Come Monday morning, not fine, not at all. They were probably worse, Buddie woke me up so he could eat breakfast then he went right back to bed (not like him at all). I stayed home with him on Monday...he laid in the same spot all day long, and didn't hardly open his eyes. I cried pretty much all day knowing that he was probably not going to get any better. We decided it was time to put him to sleep. Tuesday morning Buddie ate his last meal and was excited for the car ride. Little did he know this would be the last time for a while that he would be seeing us. Dan and I tried to hold back our tears but at this point there was no luck in that. We took him in and at 8:45 he was pain free. He was really the best first dog we could have ever asked for. I still cry myself to sleep, but I believe it's better to have loved and lost than to have never have loved at all. We know we gave him the best life, spoiled him like crazy, and gave him all the love possible. We are going to miss you Buddie, eat all the ice cream you can, and say hello to those we have lost. We want to thank our family and friends for being there, you guys are all amazing we are very blessed.

We love you Buddie! 12/15/2007-7/13/2010

Love from the Buchholz Home!