I was watching Kirsties Homemade Christmas a couple of weeks ago. Lemmy wanted to watch it too, and started to get very excited about the approaching festivities. He saw the section with the children making saltdough decorations and suddenly decided he would like to do it. The power of television eh? I've done saltdough with him before but he rapidly got bored with it.
Anyway off we went to make the dough and we cut out lots of Christmas trees and stars and I did some rounds to paint as baubles. The following week when they'd been baked and were ready we painted them and covered them (and ourselves!) in glitter too. I'm going to put the strings on later and figure out where to hang them, so I'll take some photos and add them to the blog.
The 1st of December was a sad day at the Old Schoolhouse. Our lovely, soppy dog was put to sleep at the vets. I've blogged about it over at my other blog http://motherofintention.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-sad-good-bye.html but I wanted to mention here too as obviously this is something that has had an impact on Lemmy. He's taken the news pretty well, but then he's lost two pets in the last year already. With Kelly-dog I didn't tell him she was PTS. I really wasn't sure how he would deal with that news. But this time his dad told him that Oz-dog was gone and had prepared him with the knowledge that he may have had a special sleeping medicine at the vets. Lemmy asked me this outright and I generally don't believe in lying to children, if there is an age appropriate way of explaining something to them. So I told him the truth, and he asked if Kelly had died the same way and I admitted that she had. We had a very long conversation about how and why this was done. It happened over the course of the weekend, he came and asked questions as he thought of them. Sometimes asking the same questions over and over. I think he understands now.
He also asked if we'd buried him in the garden like we did with Kelly and I had to admit that we hadn't. We've had him cremated and will be burying his ashes next to Kelly when we get them back. He knew about cremation already as his Great-nana died ealrier in the year and she was cremated. He still asked a LOT of questions about it though.
I know some people struggle with how to broach the subject of death with small children. My view is that the best way forward is honesty as much as possible and in an age appropriate way. We haven't had to deal with the death of a close loved one yet, and I know that will be a whole different ball game when it does happen but I do hope that having taken such an honest approach with loss of our dogs has set the groundworks of making it as easy as it possibly could when they time does come.
Us grown ups are still very much in the grief stage of the loss of this four legged member of our family. Lemmy seems to have moved on emotionally very swiftly. We're buoyed by that ourselves. Christmas is coming and Lemmy's obvious childish enthusiasm for that is infectious.
