We have a very good friend in California, so good in fact we adopted his parents! They’re the best! Naturally they became Kylie’s doting grandparents, and Kylie loved her grandparents!

Our best road trips were to visit them in Anaheim, and as soon as we arrived she became a different dog. She was so sweet and docile and well behaved… it was weird. We would go gallivanting with our friends and Kylie would stay at the house with her grandparents. She would sit between them on a lay-z-boy and let them spoil her rotten. She would follow them around, go on walks around the neighborhood, being friendly to neighborhood dogs. It didn’t hurt that she got a steady supply of roast beef from her grandma!

After a couple days of that we would ask her, “who are you and what have you done with our punk ass dog?” So we would try and out her. We would get one of the toys she loved to terrorize, we always brought one or two along, and try and get her riled up. It actually only worked once. She suddenly got vicious and pounced on the toy and growled aggressively. Then she suddenly stopped and looked around, and her grandma was shocked, and just as we were about to say, “you see, she’s a mean dog,” her grandma said, “Oh Kylie, are they picking on you? You poor thing.” And Kylie didn’t miss a beat, she played along and went to her like she had been beaten so that she could be comforted with a whole slice of roast beef.

Con Artist!!

The funny thing was that this behavior would go on the whole time we were there, then as soon as the first back pack was in the hatch back, Kylie was in the car and you couldn’t convince her to get out again.

As much as she loved being there, being treated like a princess, she never totally lost that fear of abandonment that shelter dogs always have. She knew if we were loading the car it meant we were leaving and she was not going to be left behind.

Silly girl, like we would ever leave her!

Here’s a friday night movie for all you Kylie fans! It’s an action Flick..

Kylie used to do this every night in the summer in our New Jersey apartment. And the sprinklers didn’t come on until 11 PM!

We’ve begun hearing the first claps of springtime thunder around here and it makes us miss Kylie even more – if that’s possible. She had always been especially scared of loud noises, which is why we called her Chicken Little. Of course then when we found out about the drive-by we felt terrible and once again realized we had been really bad parents!

Anyway, once we moved to the mainland and had thunderstorms to deal with regularly, they didn’t just frighten Kylie, they would send her under the bed for the rest of the day, shaking and cowering. It was heartbreaking and absolutely nothing would console her, until…

One day, I don’t know how we got the idea, but during a particularly thunderous thunder storm we started encouraging her to BARK back at the thunder. And she did! Meekly at first, but with encouragement she got braver and of course louder! And louder, and louder, and louder, barking, howling, and carrying on like a lunatic!! All the while we would cheer her on and she loved it, and we loved seeing her brave and empowered instead of terrified. Knowing that thunderstorms are a common fear for dogs, we thought we should do an infomercial or something about how to empower your pooch, and get rich.

Then we went on vacation to hawaii – the only place we went on vacation without Kylie – and a friend of ours stayed at our house to take care of Kylie. One day when we called to see how they were doing, the friend who sounded very tired told us they were fine but there had been a series of storms the night before, in the middle of the night, and well therefore she was pretty tired at work that day.

“Oops, sorry about that,” we apologized. We felt a little guilty, but we explained our motivation for encouraging the foul-weather ferociousness. Fortunately there weren’t any more stormy nights during our trip and we brought our friend a large quantity of macadamia nuts and all was forgiven!

We of course continued to instigate the insanity, especially in colorado where thunder comes almost daily from late May to early July.

And the winner is…

Kylie!!

That hand-puppet was the best purchase from a dollar store ever!

April 24th was the day that we celbrated Kylie’s Birthday [ Her actual date of birth was likely earlier in the year, if we believe what they estimated correctly when we got her from the Hawaiian Humane Society. ] And celebrate we did!

We tried to make every birthday special. If the weather was nice there was usually a picnic in the park, and a shopping trip. Sometimes we celebrated with friends, always with our little family. Sometimes we even went on a little trip to the mountains or something. But there were two things that we ALWAYS did.. we always had a Happy Meal (or some other fast food kid’s meal for lunch), and we always had CAKE!

We would sing the birthday song – which was her favorite song and she would jump and dance!

Of course there were also presents, and Kylie thoroughly enjoyed opening presents!

Today Kylie would be 16, and since last year we were dreaming of her Super Sweet 16 party that would be worthy of Mtv; with pink & silver streamers and a Barbie car since she would be old enough to drive (legally this time)!

Today we are very sad.

Happy Birthday Kylie, we miss you so much.

Kylie loves root beer! It’s just one of the things she has in common with Snoopy.

And she knew the difference.. if you tired to give her coke or pepsi she would take one drink and look at you like, “wth? something’s wrong with this root beer.” Then she’d have no more of it! And around here, it’s always Barq’s root beer, because Barq’s has bite! It also has caffeine – it’s the only root beer that does – and if there’s anything Kylie needed it was a caffeine buzz!

Speaking of a buzz.. if there was any beverage she liked more than root beer it was Bailey’s! OMG, she went crazy for that stuff! Once she knew you were drinking Bailey’s she was on you like a… like a terrier. We figured it was because as part jrt, she was part irish, therefore of course she likes Bailey’s, plus that stuff tastes like liquid candy! (cough, cough, bad parenting)

A friend of ours and Kylie’s once said he thought she must have been Cleopatra in a former life or something as he watched us playing her with our make up brushes. We would pretend to put blush on her cheeks and eye shadow over her great big eyes. She loved it! She loved us putting necklaces on her too.

She would even put perfume on herself. If we ever got fashion magazines, with the annoying perfume ads with the stinky sample, we could put it on the floor, she would open it and dig at it until she found the page with the perfume sample. She would then tear out that page, and tear open the flap to expose the perfume, then roll all over the page getting the smell all over herself. (you can click on the thumbnails below for larger images)

It was very funny to watch, not so pleasant to smell! She’d smell like a cheap floosie for two days!