Callie is getting old...

If you look closely you can see a small puppy peeking out of Mr Wonderful's shirt. She was so tiny!

Here she is at a couple months old. She was so cute! Lately I have been thinking more and more about Callie and her role in Mr Wonderful and I getting together. How she has been such a large part of our lives for so long...what will it be like when she is gone? Will Mr Wonderful and I lose a part of ourselves when Callie passes away?
Callie is over 13 years old and she is almost completely deaf. It is getting to the point of her being a liability when she is outside, I worry so much since she can't hear cars coming or people calling her. It is scarey for me to try to protect her. Her eyesight is also starting to fail as well. I am scared we will have to make that dreaded decision before we are ready.
For now Callie is actually fairly perky, Mr Wonderful gets home and she jumps all around and greets him, she can still jump into the back of our Dodge pick-up most days. She is kinda gettting cranky with our new dog Maggie and she will get cranky with the kids at times. She is still very loyal to Mr Wonderful. She has decided that when we are not home her rightful place is on our couch! Since she is deaf and cannot hear us come home we are always catching her snoozing on the couch when we walk in the door. She can still perk up well with no real signs of arthritis that is so common in older dogs but she does take a lot more naps between her active moments!

She will do about anything to please Mr Wonderful including becoming a retriever for grouse season. She learned to retrieve a grouse after one got away from him several years ago. She has NO breeding in her for retrieval, she is a Heinz 57 blend of cowdog. She has blue heeler, carter dog, border collie and possibly some mystery breed as well. Why is it that these mixed breed dogs usually end up being the best dogs? They don't cost a dime to get one and nothing usually goes wrong with them for years and years.

Then you go and spend hundreds of dollars on a purebred Golden Retriever puppy and she ends up chewing out her spay stitches costing a whopping $350 for a simple spay surgery, and now she has sensitive skin and needs special shampoo. Not to mention that she chewed a hole in our fairly new carpet!!!! I had forgotten how much work puppies are. It made me even more thankful for easy Callie who was already potty trained, tried and true left alone in our house, and how she is just perfect because she is all we ever knew.

Who would have ever thought she'd be this big of a part of our lives? Part of me fears that when Callie is gone I will have to face that we are also getting older and that our youth is over. It is hard to face, she has been with us thru so much of our lives, falling in love, getting married, setting up our first household, bringing home all 4 of our babies, welcoming a new puppy (she was NOT happy about this little addition), and lots of family fun to be had in the last 13 years.
I hope she can stay with us a long while! Maybe she can break some kind of dog life record right?