Photo-A-Day #3694

Tonight we took the kids over to my Uncle’s house for a cook-out. We were there because my cousin Carissa was home and this was a birthday party for my cousin Shaun and cousin Carissa. They have birthday’s 1 day apart. We had burgers and dogs and the kids played on the porch with a Lightning McQueen power wheels. It wasn’t running on batteries or anything so they took turns pushing each other in the car. I set my camera to continuous autofocus and it did a great job picking them up as they pushed the car at me. I also set the camera to continuous shooting, high mode. It worked really well.

The kids had a great time playing with their second cousin, Logan. We also played with a game called Rollors which is sort of a cross between Bocce and Horseshoes. Andrew was hilarious. He kept running back and forth to get the game pieces and give them back to us. Then when it was his turn to play he would take off running and launch the rollor right at the target from a foot away.

We got home late and we had something rather heavy to share with Eva. Our cat Oliver has been sick for a while and he has gotten sicker and sicker recently. We decided to have him euthanized, at home. We also decided that the kids would not be present and also that we would tell Eva so that she could say goodbye to Oliver. She took the news incredibly hard. We thought that we had prepared her a bit for what was coming by telling her that he was sick any chance we got. He’d lost a ton of weight and he was getting sick (diarrhea) every day in the basement. Occasionally he would get sick upstairs and that was awful. For a while it was sporadic, then in the past couple months it was every day then multiple times a day. It was time.

Eva wailed, she threw herself on the floor and told us that it was her worst day ever. And, for a seven year old who has not been old enough to understand the loss that she has had in her life, this is certainly the worst day of her life. We talked with her, comforted her and Allison even attempted to read a special paragraph from a book to her. When Alison asked Eva if it helped her feel better, she said that it did not. It was heartbreaking to see her pain. She asked me to take some photos of her with Oliver. We’ll also work on a book for her so that when she feels sad about Oliver and Duncan she can look at it.