We adopted Molly, the collie, in August of 1999 when she was 6 weeks old.
While the kids spent that afternoon with Grandma & Grandpa, Phil & I made a trip to Brodhead, WI for a collie. The owners of the mom had actually not let others see this puppy and felt OK in letting me see her. She was the human mom’s favorite. I loved her and chose this one out of only 2 or 3 puppies that were left. As we chatted, we learned they were a homeschool family too! 🙂 She is a purebred collie but without papers. (And we only paid $35! 🙂 )
When we got back to pick up the kids it was getting late and Molly was finally sleeping in the back of the van in a big box. Phil had JP go look in the van. He immediately came back out and told K to, “look in here now!” Such fun!!
We had thought that with us adopting her as a family dog and I named her, that she would be a family dog. However, she bonded like super glue to Miss K. They were quite a pair!
It was about 2002 that K started taking Molly to dog obedience classes. There we learned that Molly didn’t handle stress well and she started having seizures. It took a lot of tweaking of the medicine to find a good combo to keep her calm. But still, if something unsettling happened, she’d seize. 😦
The worst episode was when we had moved K to college in January 2007. The 3 of us left but 2 days later only 2 of us came home and Molly could tell. She had seizures for 3 days before we could get them under control!! Ugh!!
Last year we noticed that Molly hadn’t had a seizure since we had brought Nina home in Jan 2009, and it had been several months before that. Yeah!
However, the last year we noticed a lot of aging. It was hard for her to get up and she just slept most of the day. She made the deck “base” and if Nina wanted to play too much, Molly would come to the deck and the game was over. This fall Molly would stand at the back door with that long nose looking inside but when we’d try to get her in, she wouldn’t come. She is mostly deaf so we worked on hand signals a lot.
Yesterday she took a turn for the worse, and just looked awful. She was just laying down but not in her usual spot. She didn’t awaken when Phil would walk inches from her to get in the house. Her breathing was quite shallow. The men took her to the barn after lunch so she’d be warmer. Phil helped her up last night at bedtime and she drank water. We let Nina sleep in the house last night but that only lasted until 2 a.m. and she came to get Phil for play time! 🙂 He wasn’t interested in playing so took Nina out to the barn. Molly had gone to sleep for good.
She was a good pet for K but not a very good farm dog! She only barked at airplanes and birds. When someone came, she was just hoping to get petted.
and sew on... 