Time goes by so fast.. and it never comes back. Of the 7,000 plus pictures we have of Kylie this is perhaps my favorite sequence. It captured a moment of pure joy, exuberance, and Kylie-ness..  (click on the thumbnails for a larger image)

And then the moment was gone..

We haven’t had a moment of pure joy, exuberance, and Kylie-ness in three years now. We can only look back and try to remember those moments as time keeps rushing by.

Thank you, Kylie, for giving us so many happy moments, hours, days to remember!

We miss you so much.

We started a holiday tradition early on.. Christmas Cards with Kylie’s picture. One of the first ones was in a Santa suit, which Kylie oddly loved to wear, she wore that thing ’til June! So we decided to take a picture of Kylie in the Santa suit and put it on a photo Christmas card. We made a comment when we were making plans for the photo shoot, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we had one of those fake fireplaces they use in school plays and such.’ Then I think that same week we went to garage sales and guess what we found… One of those Fake Fireplaces they use in school plays and such!! It was made out of styrofoam and cost $2, and it was amazing! And so were the pictures, everybody loved them, ‘Where in the world did you get a fireplace for the background?! (we were in Hawaii remember.) So a tradition was born!

We would start in october-ish trying to think of a cute idea..  reindeer antlers, wrapped in christmas lights, cuddling on the couch with the grinch, etc.

Part of the tradition was stamping each card with her actual paw print. This was not Kylie’s favorite part of the process,  but we explained to her that it made the cards more personal; plus she got lots of treats on card stamping day! So she was generally pretty cooperative.

We would also use the photo from the annual christmas card in that year’s Hallmark ornament (they do one every year for ‘the family dog’ with the year on it, that you can put a picture in). Just another family christmas tradition that over the years gave us a tree full of Kylie ornaments.

Eventually Kylie’s christmas cards got more sophisticated, with professional photos and real cards that fold (not just the printed photo kind).  But they never lost their charm, or Kylie’s paw print, or the significance of the tradition.

If you’re lucky, the holidays are for forming happy family traditions. We miss ours so much.

No matter how bad things seem, it’s still important to be thankful for all that you have. In our case, we are mostly thankful for all that we had…

We are thankful for the 15 years we spent with the most amazing creature.

Thank you, Kylie, for the adventures, for the laughs, for the love.

Now we are so very thankful for all those memories…

We miss you, Kylie.

Just last week I got an email from a long-lost email pal:

..wondered how you and everyone’s favorite wonder dog were doing,  imagine my sadness to discover that she passed on nearly 3 years ago…i am so sorry for your loss.  i know you loved her dearly (and how could you not…her cuteness and personality were overwhelming just in pictures, so i can only imagine how much more so it was in person).  i’m having fun looking through the pictures on “two girls and a dog” and can really see how much joy and love kylie brought to your lives.

i have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “i didn’t rescue my cat, my cat rescued me.” sounds like the same could apply to you guys (replacing “cat” with “magical wonder dog” of course).  🙂

i have a son now, a 17-month-old firecracker..  his favorite word at the moment is “puppy”, so we’re looking at the pictures of kylie together.

i like to think i’m raising another fan to keep kylie’s memory alive.
—

It was so sad & wonderful to receive this thoughtful message, and to be reminded that Kylie touched the lives of so many people. And especially wonderful to know there will be a whole new generation of the Kylie club!

We miss her so much, every single day, she made our lives full and happy, she made most every day an adventure. We really had no choice but to share her and her shenanigans with the world, its bittersweet to know that so many others miss her too.

–

I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what its like to be new

Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here

And I cannot guess what we’ll discover
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

——-

From the first time we heard it, this song was always all about Kylie for us. She isn’t just a our soul mate, she was our combined souls, embodied.

We did however, sometimes change the lyrics to be even more Kylie-appropriate.. “A melody LOUDLY ROARING through my atmosphere.”

Back in the mid 90’s Kylie was possibly one of the first, or certainly among the first dogs to have a website. Looking back it was nothing to brag about, but she went a long way from there. Kyliedog.com became fairly ginormous, featuring her travel logs, her blog, interactive games and things, and even her very own News Network, KNN, reporting on important issues like Canine Discrimination and Squirrel Conspiracies! But the most famous / infamous part of Kylie’s website is the Psychic Puppy Network.

We were trying to think of something to make Kylie’s site unique, because by then lots of dogs were copy-catting Kylie and getting websites of their own. The Psychic Puppy Network was launched.. with The Great Kylini’s Magic Dog Biscuits, Past Life Regression, and online Tarot Card Readings, it became Kylie’s claim to fame.

I don’t remember what came first or in what order things took place but the Psychic Puppy Network started getting international acclaim. It was featured in a few newspapers across the country. It was a featured site on USA Today’s website, and on Seventeen magazine’s website. It received 4 out of 5 stars when reviewed by Access Magazine. Penn & Teller even linked to the Psychic Puppy Network from their website for quite awhile.

It was also a topic of conversation on several different radio stations in the US. In fact for weeks one radio station was calling “The Great Kylini” once a week (very early in the morning) for lucky numbers!

Then Kylie hit the big time.. TV, in both the US and Great Britain!In 1999 she was on the tele on London’s “So Graham Norton” show as part of a regular segment about wacky things on the internet. Then in 2000 Kylie did a LIVE interview via webcam for the TechTv (now the G4 network) program, “The Internet Tonight”!

Eventually, the excitement wore off and the internet moved on to dancing hamsters, and bulldogs who ride skateboards, and the like. And Kylie, well she was just Kylie.. unaffected by the love and adoration of the masses. She just loved her life and loved us, celebrity was inconsequential.

But for those of you who just thought Kylie was your typical, little white dog (though somewhat extra smart and sassy and cute), you should know she really was a super star – and not just to us!

Ok, this one definitely gets filed under “bad parenting”… once in awhile we would take Kylie to Petsmart or Petco.

So far that sounds normal, right? Everybody takes their pet to Petsmart, however we were going in for a very specific agenda.. Kylie’s anti-reptile agenda!

We would go in and maybe look at some toys or treats, then casually stroll over to the birds, or the fish, on our way to The Lizzards!! Sometimes, if they were well camouflaged she wouldn’t even see them at first. It’s like she was a t-rex and her vision was based on their movement. And inevitably they would move, and eventually they would dart at her from behind the glass, and Kylie would launch her counter strike! She would lunge at the glass snarling and bearing her teeth, the hair on her back standing up (we called that her dorsal fin), carrying on like she was ready to eat ’em for a snack.

Sometimes if said attack was a little too loud we would have to quickly snatch her up and shuffle her away from the scene of the crime and pretend to be innocently shopping for stain remover or something. But Kylie would always be very pleased with herself.

Then she would try her intimidation tactics on the gerbils or ferrets but she did not seem to get the results she was looking for there.. they just ignored her. Which she seemed to think was just rude!

Come to think of it, Kylie seemed to have issues with other reptiles as well..

—

Sometimes, especially when it was particularly warm you would catch Kylie with one or both of her ears flipped back..

Whoever spotted it would say “Kylie’s got her top down!” or sometimes, “Kylie’s got her lid off!”

We never knew how she did it, never caught her in the act. Which I’m sure is no accident because as you can see, she would get pretty annoyed when we took her picture like that – Like we were catching her without her makeup on or something!

It may seem a bit out of order to go from spring flowers to winter sports, but for the record it snowed on our spring flowers last night. Besides, Kylie was not one to stick to anybody’s rules about keeping things in order!

Kylie LOVED snow, and one of her favorite things to do in the snow… SLEDDING!

No, she didn’t go down on her own but as soon as we would sit down on the sled she was very happy to jump on your lap!

She was even happier at the bottom of the hill to jump off, shake, and head back up the hill.. it was almost like she was saying, “Let’s do it again!”

And whenever we were at a really populated sled hill, people were always amazed and amused, “look at the dog getting on the sled!” But Kylie always was a crowd-pleaser.

Of course sledding is exhausting work, sometimes on a sunny sledding day the sled itself became the perfect place for a nap. Or if we were sledding in the mountains, it would be a very quiet car ride because Kylie would be passed out all the way home!