If you’ve talked to me, you have probably heard at least one story about my little men, my first babies. Jake, my only puppy ever, and how he was my heart, or Faux (pronounced “Fox” – we were really into “The X-Files” and I thought it was a good joke since he was a hound and not at all a fox to spell it “Faux” – not so funny when you are waiting at the vet and they call, “Fo….Fo…”), and all his crazy Beagle antics. Although he was 10 when we adopted him from the Cowlitz County Humane Society (“Tired old boy, needs a place to live out his twilight years…yeah, right! He was a wild man, and rocked our world for the next 8 years), and had been scraped up off the highway after tangling with a car, we still had all sorts of puppy behavior to work out. These two got me through…well, they got me through. They hung in there for me waaaay past what was reasonable, and it was still agony to lose them (in 2006, but I’m still tearing up). I wish I had decent photographs of them, but one thing we always did was a “family Christmas card” – oh, my husband is a good sport! Yesterday my mom and Sandee stopped by – having recently moved, my mom often brings me “treasure” – and in the stack was a holiday card from around 2000 – my BOYS! This image is scanned off the old card – I have the photos somewhere…but what a find!

Eklund Family, 2000