Thanks for all the kind comments!
I am not sure I can attach pic's as I see no way of doing it. Is it ok to post links? Here is a
link to a video I took of the girls playing in the snow
Ok, here is my story about our girls. I work as a bldg insp for the county and found an abandoned border collie pup about 4-6 weeks old while out working back in Aug '95. She was the smartest most compassionate dog I had ever met or had. Flash forward to the summer of '03. My wife and I had been thinking about adopting a younger dog as a companion for our border collie Lucky. We found a likely candidate at our local humane society shelter and decided to see if they would be compatible. Ended up being the best of friends. Chance was a Belgian sheepdog about 3-4 yrs old. Absolutely gorgeous! Unfortunately we found out about 4 months later that he had epilepsy. Scariest damn thing I have ever been through. The first attack happened in the middle of the night. Had no idea what was going on. Got him to the vet in time and got him sedated. We now proceeded to fight this awful affliction for the next 3 1/2 years. He finally lost his fight on Christmas day in '06. He was maxxed out on his maintenance meds by then and just couldn't come out of the seizures he had that day. We ended up calling our mobile vet and we decided to have him put out of his suffering at home instead of subjecting him to any more vet visits (he absolutely hated going to the vet cause it was always as a result of a seizure attack).
Had to take a quick little break to wipe the tears away.....
Well Lucky didn't take the loss of Chance well at all. She stopped eating for about 2 weeks after. She finally seemed to be coming back around and was eating again normally for about 3 weeks when she stopped eating again. This went on for a week when we decided we had to get her in to see what was wrong. She still had plenty of go and play, but just didn't seem interested in eating much of anything. Well the vet found a huge tumor in her belly. Was involved with most of her organs thus no way of treating her for it. Wow, now we needed to have another long time friend and family member put to sleep. Not a great way to start the new year, huh?
So we found ourselves without a dog for the first time since getting married in 1980. A co-worker of mine had gotten a great little Sheltie pup the previous fall and of course we had fallen in love with him. I grew up with my grandparents having had Collies and had loved them ever since. Well we had planned on taking a vacation since the previous fall and even though we were still reeling from the loss, decided to still take the trip. On the way back we had decided to stop by the Sheltie breeder where my co-worker got hers to see her pups. We knew she didn't have any available so we felt safe in going and not being subject to an impulse buy. I really wanted to make sure when we decided to get another dog it was for the right reasons and not simply trying to fill the very large hole we felt at the time. Well when we got there, she proclaimed that she had decided to "cull" a couple of her breeding bitches. Well after thinking about it for a whole couple of minutes.....
.....we decided to go ahead and get both girls.
We have not regretted a single moment since. They are simply the best thing to happen to us.
I hope I haven't bored you all to death........
Welcome!!