Our house has three of them.

Well, technically, they aren’t men.

They are two dogs and a cat.

Ben, our oldest lab, turns 14 this week.

Odyssey will be 10 on the same day.

Hobbes, our cat, will be 14 in March.

They are a lot of work right now.

Ben doesn’t know if he is coming or going…the poor guy. He wanders aimlessly through the house. Click. Click. Click. The sound of his overgrown nails on the floor is enough to drive you insane. He soils his bed routinely, hasn’t gone up to the second floor in almost two years, and barks outside because it is hard for him to get back up on the deck once he goes down onto the grass. His whole body is stiff. He can’t see well at all. And, I am pretty sure he can’t hear much of anything either. I wonder about his quality of life.

Odyssey has been having some major incontinence issues since late November. We treated him for a UTI. It got better, but then came back. We put him on a second round of antibiotics and had a more sensitive urinalysis done. They found no bacteria. No infection. So, we recently started him on an incontinence drug. A 10-14 day trial. We are 5 days in. It’s not working yet. We are washing his bedding daily as it is soaked every morning. And, he sneaks up onto the kids beds if their doors aren’t closed, so their bedding gets soaked, too. To make matters worse, the washer won’t finish a cycle and it takes forever to get through laundry (the good news is that we have a part on order to hopefully fix that). I am hoping and praying that suddenly this medicine starts to work in the next five days. If not, we are in for seeing a specialist for more imaging to find out what is going on with him. I don’t even want to think of the possibilities.

Hobbes. Our little patient, diabetic kitty. Right now he is just on a prescription diet and we don’t give him injections. It seems to be ok. The good news is that he is no longer peeing all over the house since we got our new floors in. He misses his litter box occasionally, but I now use “wee-wee pads” around his litter box and that soaks up the mess. Hobbes is always the last to get fed and I find him sleeping in my bathroom sink because he falls asleep waiting for somebody to turn on the water for him to drink. He gets grumpy with the dogs. In fact, as I was typing this he was guarding the stairs and would’t let Odyssey past. Just like a grumpy old man.

Lately, I have been impatient with all of them. It feels like every ounce of energy is spent cleaning up messes (theirs and the kids).

I don’t want to let Ben out…AGAIN…so he will, moments later, want to come right back in.

I don’t want to hear Hobbes meow for me to turn on the bathroom sink so he can drink from the faucet.

I don’t want to walk into my bedroom and smell urine on Odyssey’s soaked bed…and have to do another load of laundry.

What I NEED to do is…

take Odyssey for a run to clear my head, get some fresh air, and the exercise I so badly need so I can be patient.

snuggle Hobbes and just turn on the faucet so he is happy.

give Ben a “mommy massage” like I used to do when he would come back from a big hunting weekend with Ryan.

The time will come when there is not a dog to run with, a cat meowing for food or water, and a dog that is barking at the door to be let out or in.

There won’t be soiled beds to wash or a litter box to scoop.

When we moved to Oregon eight years ago we came out here with all of of belongings…including three dogs and two cats. We said goodbye to Murphy in 2009 and Oak in 2010.

Sadly, I see more goodbyes in our near future.

Right now, I’m going for that run with Odyssey.

home is…taking care of our four legged fuzzy faced friends.