{"id":3148,"date":"2014-04-21T11:16:43","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T16:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/?p=3148"},"modified":"2014-05-09T10:27:50","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T15:27:50","slug":"howie-2000-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2014\/04\/howie-2000-2014.html","title":{"rendered":"Howie the Wonder Dog: May 2000 – April 19, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Howie<\/a>

Howie lying in the snow on our back deck, one of his favorite places to be. This was taken on April 13th. The last picture I took of him.<\/p><\/div>\n

This past weekend was very sad for our family. We lost our beloved family dog, Howie<\/a>. He had developed a liver tumor that grew incredibly quickly. We first discovered it in February while he was getting pre-dental blood work done. On Saturday morning, after 36-48 hours of not eating, he had grown so weak he needed immediate medical attention. Our vet was open on Saturday mornings, and she was able to quickly take an x-ray and determined that the tumor had completely overtaken Howie’s liver, and was pressing his lungs, stomach, and intestines up against his abdominal cavity.<\/p>\n

It had to be so painful for him.<\/p>\n

He seemed okay\u00a0last\u00a0Wednesday night, walking around, taking the stairs, and even playing with his stuffed animals with Dave and the boys. This all happened so quickly.<\/p>\n

The vet didn’t think Howie would make it through the weekend, so we elected to put him down peacefully. I shudder at the thought of him dying alone while the boys were at school or we were all at baseball practice while Dave was at work. On Saturday morning the boys and I were at a chess tournament up the street, and we immediately left the event to sit with Howie at the vet for his final minutes. It was very quiet and peaceful for him, although we humans were making quite a racket of bawling our eyes out.<\/p>\n

We are still pretty grief-stricken, but don’t regret our decision. We’re slowly putting our game faces back on, but it’s been tough. Seeing the boys so sad just compounds Dave’s and my own grief.\u00a0Today I had to make phone calls to cancel his June kennel visits, and his surgical consultation scheduled for the end of the month up in Denver. We put away his beds, blankets, toys, and feeding supplies, and I’m working on donating some of those items to the kennel, who fosters dogs from the Humane Society routinely.<\/p>\n

I have so much I want to write about, but for now I just wanted to share his last photo, which is so cute.<\/p>\n

We are comforted to know that Howie is waiting for us on the Rainbow Bridge<\/a>, wagging his tail, with both knees in tact so he can chase all the squirrels and rabbits he wants. I’m sure over time we will remember him with smiles instead of tears, but for now, thank heavens for Costco-sized multi packs of Kleenex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend was very sad for our family. We lost our beloved family dog, Howie. He had developed a liver tumor that grew incredibly quickly. We first discovered it in February while he was getting pre-dental blood work done. On Saturday morning, after 36-48 hours of not eating, he had grown so weak he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[505,383,80,504],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ycQ0-OM","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":290,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2009\/01\/howie-my-forgotten-baby.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":0},"title":"Howie, My Forgotten Baby","date":"04 January 09","format":false,"excerpt":"I just realized that I never blogged about Dave's and my first baby, Howie.From HowieThe day we got him, he had to wear the leash for about 24 hours straight and the crate was his home for the first 18 months or so.Or Howard.Or Howie-the-Wonder-Dog.From HowieHowie is our 8 1\/2\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"family\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3155,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2014\/04\/howie-memories.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":1},"title":"Howie Memories: It’s Those Little Things","date":"23 April 14","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been 5 days, and I'm pleased to report that we can now write and talk about Howie without bursting into tears. But it sure was a tough 5 days...for Jacob, it was the worst first thing in the morning, when he usually kisses Howie good morning, and at bedtime,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"death\"","img":{"alt_text":"June 2013, at Howie's last family reunion in Lancaster. Jacob loved him so much.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/DSC_2927-1024x677.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":446,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2010\/07\/jacobs-video-of-howie.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":2},"title":"Jacob’s Video of Howie","date":"31 July 10","format":false,"excerpt":"Jacob asked me to share this with you. Jacob thinks that Howie seems to perk up at the word \"Rhino\"...and he does. But I'm not sure it's the word as much as the inflection in his voice. Jacob enjoys watching funny dog videos on You Tube. His favorite series of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"howie\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2142,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2013\/06\/happy-birthday-howie.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":3},"title":"Happy Birthday Howie!","date":"07 June 13","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm over a month late, but better late than never! Happy 13th birthday to our dear Howie. He's still going strong, ironically, his latest medical ailment was an infected hot spot on his tail, of all things (that's for another post). I was in the middle of Operation EAT WHAT\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"birthday\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/harrypottercake.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3159,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2014\/04\/howie-slideshow.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":4},"title":"Howie Slideshow","date":"28 April 14","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a work in progress, but I've been consolidating Howie photos from my Google photo albums into one location. For those photos that are already in Google, this has been quite simple. Select the group of photos, and select \"Copy into New Album\". However, I didn't start using Google\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"dog\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":615,"url":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/2011\/07\/howie-our-photographic-challenge.html","url_meta":{"origin":3148,"position":5},"title":"Howie – Our Photographic Challenge!","date":"16 July 11","format":false,"excerpt":"Photo by Fotomom.While Maryann AKA Fotomom was here visiting last week she took a really sweet picture of Howie in our kitchen. \u00a0After she got home this week, she took some time to dress up the picture and wrote a lovely blog post about him and how she made the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/fotomom.smugmug.com\/Daily-Photos\/My-Best-Daily-Shots\/i-QzGZBj7\/0\/S\/IMG0734AutoContrastTexture3Cro-S.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3148"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3188,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3148\/revisions\/3188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thevollmerfamily.com\/MajorMom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}