Kylie’s first christmas was an eventful one… We lived in hawaii where it was very expensive to buy a real tree but we always did. Kylie’s first christmas tree survived about three days, however because during that time she managed pull it down three times!

We never witnessed how she did it specifically, but we’re pretty sure it was because she was going after a particular ornament. It was a little wicker basket with a tiny little dog and cat curled up together on a red & green plaid blanket. For some reason Kylie was determined to destroy it – and she was successful!

Eventually we managed to block off the tree, and after that first year she never again tried to destroy the tree (though for several years she seemed perplexed about why we were bringing the outdoors in), or any ornaments, she would even wait until christmas eve to tear into her presents. That first year though, we had to tell her that Santa did not bring goodies to bad little doggies – of course she still got plenty of goodies.

Now, there’s only one thing we want from Santa..

(btw, whenever you see small photos like these in a post here, you can click on them to see a larger version.)

Well since we admitted already that Kylie’s no angel, here’s a specific example of how bad (yet smart) she could be.. In order to help her maintain her mobility and flexibility in her adulthood we took Kylie swimming once a week. She didn’t “enjoy” it per se, but she was willing and  after her swim session she would always play around in the rehab area like a loony, running and jumping so it seemed to make her feel good.

During her sessions Kylie swam in an endless pool  – you know the ones that generate a current for you to swim against, and with her short neck she did have a little trouble keeping her chin up. So to help her keep from struggling we winched her up a little using the handle on the back of her life jacket. This seemed to work great until…

One day her swim coach unhooked her a little early and she didn’t see it coming and as soon as the hook came off she SANK like a stone!! For a few seconds she actually swam under water! It turns out Kylie had been FAKING it, letting the hook hold her up and pretending to swim!

We were not happy (swimming sessions were like $35/each).. but we were laughing! And soon after, Kylie found herself spending her swimming sessions on the underwater treadmill where there was no way to cheat. Although she did sometimes attempt to keep her front feet on the ledge on the front of treadmill – but hey you can’t blame a girl for trying!

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Okay, so she wasn’t always an angel…

And that’s why we really miss her!

Clearly Kylie had some very specific sleeping preferences, like the princess and the pea perhaps. And of course she never had a lack of options, she pretty much had a bed in every room of the house.

Then one day we were at the grand opening of Wag n Wash in Colorado Springs, and we were having a conversation with some people about their dog, and about Kylie dog (you know how dog people are). We were going on and on, as we will do, about how great Kylie is, and how smart Kylie is, etc. And not kidding, quite literally, we were in the process of telling them how she never ever used the bathroom where she wasn’t supposed to, when somebody interrupted, and said “Uhmm,” and pointed at Kylie. She had gotten up onto the bottom shelf where they had lots of beds on display and was positioned right in the middle of a rather large one… relieving herself.

Yes, that’s right, she peed on a bed in the store!! We were mortified! But Kylie seemed oddly self-satisfied. We told the proprietors, coincidentally good friends of ours, that we would of course buy the bed. They said we didn’t have to do that but we insisted, and explained that’s why Kylie gets allowance, to pay for her mistakes. Then they insisted that because the bed was peed on, we get a discount!

The important thing to know is that when I referred to the bed in question as “rather large,” that was rather an understatement… IT IS HUGE!! Seriously, a portly St. Bernard could stretch out and sleep comfortably in this thing! But we brought it home, laundered the cover and put it back together, at which point Kylie climbed in it and promptly fell asleep. At which point we promptly figured out that Kylie peed on that bed on purpose!

Let’s be honest, Kylie was pretty spoiled. Pretty much anything she showed interest in, and plenty of things she didn’t, we bought for her. But she had to know there was no way we would have bought a rather expensive, rather gigantic, bed that we barely had room for. So what’s a dog to do? “Hmm, I’ll bet if I pee on it, they’ll have to buy it!” And what do you know.. it worked!

And from then on, for several years anyway, that was Kylie’s favorite place to snooze – in a bed five times bigger than her!

And from then on, for several years anyway, our friends at Wag n’ Wash would encourage Kylie to “shop” whenever she wanted, aka, pee on whatever she wanted!

Clearly comfort is very important to Kylie, and ok, maybe she was a little spoiled…

Once upon a time one girl bought a new set of sheets that she selected strictly for the lovely color, giving little thought to the thread count which was around 200. She came home and put the sheets on the bed where Kylie at the time normally slept with her. That night Kylie got up on the bed and laid down, but something wasn’t quite right. She tried turning around in circles before laying down again, as a dog will do when they can’t quite get comfy. When that was unsuccessful, she tried digging and digging into the sheets like she was trying to uncover the real bedding where she was accustomed to sleeping, but that didn’t work either.

So finally with a “Fffthph” she got off the bed and laid on the floor!

The new sheets were promptly returned and replaced with something in the neighborhood of 400 thread count!

In all of Kylie’s travels, and she loved to travel, it was kind of a thing to stop at the state line signs and take her picture. Sometimes it was challenging with traffic rushing by and what not, but we usually did try to make sure we weren’t risking life and limb on the side of the road (we were bad parents, but not that bad).

So to really compliment her collection of state sign photos we decided to make a trek to four corners. We thought it would be cool for Kylie to be in four states at once, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. In retrospect, “cool” was probably an overestimation, it’s like the definition of the middle of nowhere down there! Anyway, we drove and drove and drove and drove, which was fine because with Kylie it was all about the journey. We finally got there and it was like she was on a mission. She walked straight up to the marker and all on her own she sat her little butt down right in the middle where the four corners meet. And even though she wasn’t a big fan of the whole picture taking process, she looked up at us, squinting in the ridiculous wind, and it was like she was saying, “ok, this is what we drove all this way for, go ahead and take my picture!” we just laughed.

All together Kylie visited 25 states I think, plus DC, and oh yeah.. Canada, twice! That’s quite a lot for one little dog!

We had only been in our house, where Kylie finally had her own big back yard, about a week and half or so when us girls went out for the evening to a concert downtown. It was the first time Kylie had been left alone in the house at all, let alone for several hours. Actually Kylie was hardly ever, very rarely ever left home alone at all, we took her absolutely everywhere we thought we could get away with it and even some places we knew we shouldn’t. It was so rare in fact I think it bothered us more than her when it did happen, she was probably happy on occasion to get some “me time” without us gettin’ in her business. On this particular evening however that was apparently not the case!

One of the first things we did when we moved in, like literally day one, was to go and get a doggie door that fit properly to give her immediate access to her yard 24/7. So its not like she was trapped indoors, so I’m not sure why she was so unhappy that we left, but she proceeded to spend the evening letting one of us know exactly what she thought…

Somehow Kylie managed to fill one girl’s bed with sand!!

What was impressive about it was that the bed was in the back of the house, as far away from the doggie door as it possibly could have been, and there wasn’t a trail of sand leading to it, there was just a bucket-full in the bed itself! Much time was devoted to speculating as to how she did it, and many theories were concocted.. Did she dig it up, clench up her little paws while she walked down the hall to hold it between her paws, waiting to release it until she got up the ramp and onto the bed?  Did she roll around outside then come back in, down the hall, up the ramp, and aggressively shake as a dog will do? We asked her… but she wasn’t talkin’! She just looked around for somebody else to blame, which lead to another theory… did she hire some raccoons?

To make matters worse, or better if you’re on Kylie’s side.. it rained most of the time we were gone. So it wasn’t just sand, it was wet-dog-scented sand!

It started in Hawaii where we lived in a high rise with windows that went all the way to the floor. Kylie would lay on the floor and look out the window down at the street at the passersby and it was like she was watching tv, it was her soap opera (actually it was more like reality tv I suppose). After awhile we noticed that she was reacting to different people in different ways, sometimes she would growl, sometimes she would wag, sometimes she got really riled up. Since we lived across the street from a bus stop we figured she most likely was seeing the same people at the same time every day, and it seemed she had decided who was nice, and who was not, and who was especially suspicious. It certainly kept her entertained and best of all for her, there were never any reruns!

Then in New Jersey her very own reality programming became more like animal planet! In our first apartment there she would manage to get herself up onto the rather narrow window sil and watch the squirrels on the roof of the building next door. And most of the time it was like they were performing for her, or maybe it was more like they were taunting her. Jumping and flipping around doing acrobatics, pointing at her and laughing, juggling acorns… okay maybe they didn’t literally do all that but they did know that she was watching them and that she couldn’t get to them so they had fun teasing her.

In our second apartment in Jersey we were on the ground floor and she could look out the sliding door or hop up on a stool and see out the back bedroom window, and in either direction see ground hogs, rabbits, or even deer. It was like Wild Kingdom! And Kylie had only recently discovered the joy of barking (a story for another time), so it was very exciting -and noisy!

Then we moved to Colorado where we had no easily accessible windows for Kylie to be able to “watch her stories” so we had to do some modifications. We bought her some cat window seats. They attached to the window sill and even though they supposedly supported up to twenty pounds we reinforced them with stronger material. We also had to arrange ramps or furniture so she could get up to them, then she was all set. She loved it, she would sit there for hours! Once she even sunburned her nose in the west facing window so we put car window tint on that one. She would sit there rain or shine, snow or sun, but at some point we started making her get down if it was just too hot we were afraid she would cook herself!

Sometimes she would get “grounded from the window seat” if she just would not stop barking at every little thing she thought was noteworthy outside. We would move the ramps so she couldn’t get up there for the rest of the day, which she thought was just cruel! Of course we never told her that her beloved window seats were really made for cats! She would not have appreciated that!

Once we bought the house and she had her own big back yard.. there was no need to install window seats anywhere. Although on occasion she would hop up on the back of the couch and look out over the front yard and up and down the street, Kylie was far more concerned with patrolling and exploring her domain than worrying about what was going on in the rest of the world. Why watch things happen when you can make things happen?!

Our friend just found these pictures of Kylie that she took during a visit.

It was just a casual car ride, but look how happy she looks – not to mention cool! She makes everything fun!

We have literally over 7,000 pictures of our Kylie girl, but it is such an amazing gift to find something now, even though we didn’t know we lost it. It’s something new, something of Kylie we’ve never seen before, it’s so bittersweet. Because that’s what we really miss, experiencing the newness of everyday with Kylie.

Thank you, Lisa.

Here’s just a glimpse of what life with Kylie is like..

..basically, it’s totally awesome!