Now that we’re liberated from the Open Book Challenge we can resume our normal blogging. There are two big things that have happened in the past several days. One is that we went on a vaca (a little mini vacation). I’ll post about that later. The second thing is that our cat Ashley had to be put to sleep. We have had two cats for the past 13 years — twin kitties. Our “first twins” as we fondly have referred to them. We named them after the rivers in Charleston, SC (where we got them from a cat shelter in January 1995 when they were baby kittens)… we named them Ashley and Cooper (the Ashley River and the Cooper River flow on either side of the peninsula that is Charleston). We have loved these cats. Pre-K&O these cats were our babies. They’ve lived in 5 different apartments/houses with us. But Ashley has been deteriorating and her quality of life was really going down hill this summer. On Thursday night we had to make the decision to put her to sleep. It was an easy decision to make because it was clear to us that it was time to let her go. She had 13 great years. Now Cooper is an “only cat.” We are sad. We have tried to explain this to Kyle and Owen — we’ve been up front. We told them on Friday morning that “While they were sleeping, Ashley died.” They seemed to understand. But they didn’t seem to really be too concerned about it. We feel o.k. with that. Braydon and I, however, are heart-broken! But this is life. And life goes on. These photos were taken just a couple nights before Ashley died. We were very concerned about her and took these photos ‘just in case’… and I’m so glad we took them. I’m posting this on the blog because someday if K & O are reading this I want them to know that they had a cat Ashley and she died when they were three. For some reason this feels important to remember right now. And since this blog is partly a ‘scrap book’ kind of thing for K & O I wanted to post about it here.
