Andy and Lisa's Adventures: Real quick regarding Madison

Thank you everyone for sending your regards and well wishes. We're not quite ready to move on so....pics/movies/stories about the twins will return next week. I feel like I need to use this as my personal journal to reflect on what's going on right now.

At times I feel silly being so upset by what happened but then I remember how much apart of this family she has been. To say the least, we are still really hurting. There were many more tears today and more to come, I'm sure.

One realization that I had was her sudden death didn't allow us to spoil her. With an aging dog, you have time to come to grips with what will eventually happen and spend the last days, weeks, or even months spoiling her with love. Although we were fortunate enough to have the time to say goodbye, it is devastating to us that the transition from happy and healthy dog to dying dog literally happened overnight.

We want so badly to be able to spoil her. There is some guilt about Madison being second to the babies, and not getting the attention she deserved these last 10 months.

I don't know why I feel that I have to justify what I'm saying or why I'm grieving but she really was a member of this family. For 10 years, she was our baby. We took pictures of her like we take pictures of the girls now...ALL the time. This morning, I was getting flustered because I couldn't find her puppy pictures and Lisa had to step in and get the photo albums out to show me where they were. We started going through the albums and it has been so therapeutic. She's a beautiful dog and we took a ton of great pictures of her. Most of the good ones were before we had a digital camera so the next couple of days I'm going to begin scanning in some pictures.

Here are 2 that I've already posted. This one is of Madison being....Madison. She loved visitors (a little too much) and would always have to be in everyone's face. This was my mom's first visit and you can see she's holding a baby. That didn't stop Madison from first just laying across Mom's lap but then eventually climbing the rest of the way up.

This second one is one of our favorites. I took this last summer. As I OFTEN did...I would be toward the end of a roll of film and needing to use the last 2 or 3 photos up, I would find Madison. It was too easy to get a good picture of her with those eyes.