Dave and I are now officially members of The Sandwich generation.
We’re raising young children, and caring for our elderly pets.
We were married for a few years before we had children. We were trying to make enough money first. As it turns out, you can never make enough.
Anyway, since we didn’t have kids, we collected dogs. We once had three. One had to go after he had a nervous breakdown when our first human child arrived.
We still have our two Cocker Spaniels, Joey and Elizabeth. They’re both going on 11 years old, which is well past retirement age in dog years.
Joey is blind. He walked right into a closed door yesterday in broad daylight.
What do you do for a blind dog? Get him a seeing eye cat? I don’ think that would work very well. The cat would probably walk him out into traffic on purpose.
Elizabeth, I’m pretty sure, is becoming incontinent. She “wet the bed” during her afternoon nap the other day. She walked over to me all wet, and I was like, “How did you get wet? You were sleeping? David! What did you do to the dog?” Then I noticed the smell, and saw the pool on the kitchen floor where she’d been snoozing.
Do they make Depends for dogs?
Suddenly we’re running an assisted living facility for aging canines.
Next they’ll be gumming pudding, and playing Bingo.
Aww, poor guys! I had a friend with a blind cat. She lived happily for years. As long as the quality of life is ok, she was ok.
Poor things – it’s as sad as watching our human families get older!!
Stopping by from SITS!
I had a cocker/rottie who went blind. He was the happiest dog ever, so we never even considered putting him to sleep. And for whatever reason, he never learned to slow down. He just continued crashing into things! We did learn to speak to him while we walked him to help out though.
I can relate as we are raising young children and running an assisted living home for our elderly 14 year old dog too. She has lost her hearing so we use hand signals to get her attention to come. She eats soft food to accomodate her loss of teeth. I also wondered about depends for dogs as her bladder isn’t what it used to be. It is an hour or more before she realizes company has stopped by and sleeps most of the day. I’m glad we don’t live in dog years!