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!

We decided we wanted to have our friend/photographer Nicole do a special photo shoot of Kylie and her best non-friend, Min, as a gift for Min’s mum & dad. It turned out to be a cold, rainy day so we made it an inside shoot so we went with a theme that worked well indoors..

Then at some point we had been focusing on Min for awhile trying to help her get over her camera shyness to get some great shots like this..

Well apparently Kylie had gotten bored waiting, or wanted to get back to the center of attention, because out of nowhere she kind of stumbled into the frame with her hood over her eyes! We were laughing so hard we didn’t get any photos of her walking around with her nose up and her eyes covered, but then she plopped down right in the middle and Nicole got a couple like this..

She had been wearing her hoodie for some earlier shots, but we have no idea how she got the hood on. It was so obviously intentional, and so hilarious!

She was such a clown and just loved to make us laugh!

[You can see many, many more pics from Kylie & Min’s photo shoot on nicolehowardphotography.com]

We received a wonderful comment from a reader named Sara recently:

This is a beautiful tribute to your beloved friend. Thank you for sharing this with me, (everyone). I know myself how hard it is to go on without our best friends. I have heard they will be with us in the after life also, but I know the one question I want to ask God is why are their lives so much shorter than ours? I mean it is inevitable we will be hurt one day. I know that reality doesn’t keep me from loving these wonderful companions at all! I would not trade anything for the time I had with Angel my best friend, she was my service dog, well after I trained her and helped her, she was a rescue, but really she rescued me!!

God Bless you both. Keep sharing.
……………….

Thank you, Sara, for the  kind words and encouragement.

Kylie, We haven’t been sharing much lately, but its not because we haven’t been thinking about you. We think about you all the time, we miss you every day, every minute. And now we’ve got you with us all the time.

You were already tattooed forever on our hearts, now you are with us forever on the outside too.

Yes, that is your actual paw print, including the toenails that clearly needed to be clipped (people are giving us a hard time about that). Remember all those times we made you stick your paw on the ink pad then stamp all those christmas cards? You were pretty annoyed with us, but tolerant as always. We also had the artist mix some of the ashes we have with the ink so you are now literally a part of us. Obviously, they’re not healed yet, but neither are we.

Not that we needed a tattoo to keep you with us always, we just wanted something to show the world how much you mean to us inside and out.

—

Before we had our CRV we borrowed one from some friends to drive up into the mountains. Kylie rode in the backseat of course, and she made herself at home on a child’s car seat. She loved it!! She loved the elevation, inside and out of the car, and especially in the car seat where she could get even higher and look down into the other cars – or at least be eye level with them. In Colorado almost everybody drives an suv and apparently she didn’t like the view from the little honda hatchback so much.

It was then that we decided to buy a CRV for ourselves – well, more accurately for Kylie! But we told her that we absolutely refused to put a child safety seat in the back!  Fortunately we found something better.. a booster seat! It was made specifically for dogs, it provided a comfortable raised seat, storage space under the seat, and you could even take it out of the car and unfold it to make a bed in the hotel room or wherever. It’s pretty cool – and it was possibly Kylie’s favorite place to be!

Her favorite place to snooze during a long road trip..

Her favorite place to stand guard, or rather sit and guard her CRV…

Definitely the best place to look down at people in tiny little cars..

and no question, the best place ever to just cruise and be cool!

But Kylie is always cool!