oh, duncan. he was the perfect childhood dog. he was from a bad backyard breeder, and bringing him home felt like a rescue. he was the runt. we got him when he was 5 months old. he was not all there in the head, he was always a little messed up but when he was young, i hit him in the head with a baseball bat while he was trying to chase the ball my grandpa was throwing for me, he ran right into the downswing. went into shock and all, i thought i killed him, but he survived. he was never quite the same after that, and i never wanted to play baseball again. he was nothing but love, not an aggressive bone in his body, all he wanted was to be close to people. he loved tennis balls, a grassy patch, sleeping in my bed, baby carrots and american cheese and pupperonis, and kids of all sizes. he was obsessive about socks, if he got a single or a folded pair, he would take it under the couch and hide with it. not chewing it really, he rarely destroyed them, he just wanted to sit with them in his little cave. he would growl at everyone but me for taking them away. he loved to pounce and chase hands and feet under blankets. my mom used to wake us up for school by tossing him into our beds and letting him lick our faces and climb all over us, i loved it. he would always bite the hems of my pants, especially flared jeans. he loved fetch so damn much. he liked when we'd bounce the ball off a wall and he could body slam into it on the chase to get it. he tore all the fuzz off his favorite tennis balls, and he'd tip over the big toy bucket with his front paws to find his favorite ones in the depths. i could walk him without a leash and he'd stick close to me. he is the sole reason i stopped playing with polly pockets, he chewed up so many of the dolls and clothes i had. duncan smelled like a pier at noon from his nasty teeth, he was constantly greasy, he licked incessantly and drooled a little, and always peed himself when he got excited, but he loved us so much, and i loved him with every fiber of my being. i wish i had more pictures of him, but he lived before smartphones came to our home. i didn't get nearly enough time with him, i went to school when he was 2.5, and came back a busy teenager the year he passed away quite early at age 9. i barely remember all the personality that my parents and sisters do. he started to act old early, his poor breeding making itself known again, but he was spritely and his normal self until his last couple weeks. he had a series of strokes, started hiding under the couch or in his kennel all day, he bit me when i took a pair of socks away. he had his final one while i was at a community college class, and my parents were at work. my mom found him when she got home, he was alive but not well enough to continue living, and she took him in. i never truly said goodbye, but he'd been pretty sick that week. i knew. the night before i told him it was okay to go, and he spared me having to see him at the end. it broke my heart anyway, i couldn't think of him or say his name without sobbing for years. it still makes me cry to think about him for too long. i miss him so much.

reilly, reilly, reilly. our only girl, duncan's 'sister.' my parents got her the month after i went away to school, flown in all on her own from missouri, the day before my birthday. i felt replaced by a puppy and i didn't even get to come home and meet her until she was 2. we bonded greatly anyway. she was a strong, strong personality, she made sure we knew her opinions on any matter. she loved to bark and vocalize, and to hit her tail against things and drum for attention. if she really needed something, she'd sit up on her hind legs like a meerkat and beg. no one trained her to do that, it was just her thing. she was never the biggest fan of duncan, despite growing up with him, she got a lot happier after he passed away. she lived just as much life without him as with him, and it always felt a little purposeful. truly, she hated all other dogs, and only tolerated D since she knew him from her first day home, and she thought she was his boss. duncan didn't mind being the lesser dog. she was actually quite aggressive with strangers, dog and human. she had two strikes with animal control by the time i met her and her greatest enemies were the trio of smaller dogs down our block. she was a sweetheart with us. my sisters overhandled her as a puppy so she didn't tolerate being picked up, but she liked to snuggle on the couch or lay against your leg, and slept next to my bed for most of my time living at home with her. the softest part of her body was at the base of her tail, it was so silky. when you cuddled her, she would start exhaling quite forcefully out of her nose, we called it her love steam. her head smelled like graham crackers. she loved belly rubs, napping on the back of the couch, car rides, tearing apart her toys to get the squeaker, wearing sweaters and being tucked in, sunbathing, and barking at people outside. her greatest love was FOOD, this dog did anything to get a special morsel, she was so humongously fat that her belly was almost completely bald and she ate many things that should've poisoned her without issue. i called her the iron stomach. she tore open no less than 3 nice backpacks in search of leftover school snacks, had a story about climbing onto our kitchen table and jumping 3 feet across to get a bag of chips, once my dad tested her limits with a full 16 oz can of food and she kept eating when it was done. she loved chocolate despite efforts to save her from ostensibly poison, luckily it did not seem to hurt her much. once she ate the majority of a 7 ounce hershey's kiss with only some light diarrhea, and stole mini candy bars and chocolate chip pancakes from my sister on a regular basis. she devoured until her very last moments, we let her eat an entire bag of treats at the vet when she had to be put down. her elder years were slow and steady, she got thyroid and kidney diseases, grew many fatty lumps, most of her teeth had been removed, and she went partially blind. 14 is the life expectancy for a cairn, and she was at it. she was getting sicker, and we thought she had a stroke too, shortly before her time - she bit me in the face when i kissed her one day (i still have a scar on my lip), and she stopped coming to sleep with me. she was sundowning. we made an appointment to get her some new pain meds at the least, and after we dropped her off, she got a terrible bloody nose at the vet. they said they suspected brain cancer with her personality changes, and it might be best to let her go then instead of going through diagnostics, she was hurting. we drove back to say goodbye, let her eat that bag of treats, sobbed and wailed in the room with her. she wanted to go back outside. i wanted to let her so badly. i still wish we'd brought her home just one more night, but i know it's selfish. i just wanted her to get to sunbathe one last time. i miss her so much too.

my doogie bear. he is our best-bred dog, and our craziest. he is from nice european lines with his big square head, he is properly pedigreed from a champion sire, and he is filled with the greatest anxiety. i know dogs can't have autism but this one does. he is constantly freaking out. his breeder said "oh, you've got that one!" when we picked him up. his mom and aunts were so cute and those were the quietest set of cairns i've ever met, but not ours. he is also HUGE! he is twice the size of a regular cairn at a lean nearly 30lbs and about 18 inches tall - he can stretch to 3ft+. his paws are so wide. i believe his littermates are of a similar size. he somehow manages to hit my own autism right on the nail, his whining pitch physically hurts my ears, he walks at the slowest pace that i do not have the patience for so he can sniff everything he can get close to, and he is constantly wet, stinky, crying, and trying to be wet and stinky and crying on top of me. despite it all, i adore him. he is just obsessed with me, i have always been his person, and it kills me that he irritates me in a way i can't fix. i make myself suffer his nasties because i love him so dearly, but i am glad he can't come in my room because the cat is scared of the dogs. he is the friendliest dog we've ever had, we can't go on car rides with him because he cries to the people in cars and along the street where he can see out of the window for their attention. he loves other dogs, too much. he is leash reactive because he wants to run to the other dogs to be friends too badly. when we took him to puppy class, his best friends were the biggest dogs there, cane corsos and german shepherds and such, and he is very good at dog communication and has generally good boundaries. he is weirdly intelligent, he understands object permanence? i swear he does. he always remembers where we've hidden things we take from him, and he never cries at the door when we leave, but runs to whatever window faces our egress point so he can see us go. our front door and garage are on different sides of the house, and the window that faces the door is all the way upstairs. he runs up there every time i use the front door, he doesn't wait for me where i left from, he wants to see where i've gone. he remembers the house of every dog he's ever met, even when they didn't meet at the dog's house, he can tell by the smells. when he was a puppy, i thought he showed signs of being able to cardiac alert, he would paw and sniff at my pulse points when my heart rate spiked. i am not a very good dog trainer so i did not try to develop that. he likes to play with random household objects instead of toys, his favorites are empty containers such as large cans or clear storage bins, inflated plastic packaging material, and a knee support pillow. he loves to chase the rats that eat at my mom's birdfeeders. he hasn't killed one yet because i haven't wanted to clean up the aftermath, but i think he'd do great at his genetic job there. he is incredibly picky about food, he doesn't like anything too wet or too crunchy, they eat very expensive freeze dried dog food because it's the only texture he accepts. he doesn't even like many table scraps, so far the only winners are cheese, bacon gristle, and a mostly skin cut of white peaches. he does like to eat off my sister's plates if she leaves anything in her room where he can reach. when he eats, he demolishes everything in the area, slurps a ton of water, and then flops down for a nap. we call it 'hippo hour.' he is obsessed with water, for drinking, splashing, sprinklers, the complex pool, all of it. i think he would love to swim if he was allowed in the pool. he has a very silly energy. he reminds me a lot of duncan. i'm only partially kidding around when i say i think a piece of duncan came back in him, not a full reincarnation, but it always feels there's some dunc besides the doog. i say that's why he's so big, he's two dogs. duncan also irritated me with his wet stinkiness LOL. we felt it was a little karmic anyway with his birthdate, another double date like the last two, and the soonest one after reilly's passing. it just lined up. despite him constantly pissing me off a little bit, i think he is my heart dog. he is just something special. my big stinky little angel.

tavvie... he is a bit of a demon. doogie needed a friend, and my mom got impatient with waiting for a new litter from doog's breeder, she was giving all the ladies a season off. she found another, definitely less quality and would not have been my choice, but he seems mostly okay health-wise for now. my mom picked out the one that was climbing over his siblings in the videos of the litter, we wanted a stronger personality to stand up to doogie's anxiety, to hopefully give him a complement. it kinda worked? they do complement each other, but tav is a bit more antagonistic than we hoped... luckily, he doesn't think he's doogie's boss. he was the cutest, tiniest puppy when he came home. he is little for a cairn, fully half of doogie's size. very opposite in the breed standard. this is the first small dog i've ever met who is aware that he is small, he knows how to worm his way under things and between legs and into crevices. he loves to bite, especially hands and feet, on us and poor doogie. my hands are his favorite chew toy and i know that's my fault for letting him, but i thought i was still teaching him bite inhibition until it was too late to change. he loves to tear things apart and eat the insides. when he was 6 months old, he ate so much hair off doogie and my mom that he got impacted and had to get exploratory surgery. he was split from sternum to asshole. there was 13 inches of hairball inside of his intestines, and he definitely would've died without intervention. however, 6 months is not a great developmental time for a little dog to need to be coddled and put in a baby carrier and not allowed to learn doggie things, i think it really messed him up... but he's maturing into a good little man now. he is also quite anxious, but he displays it with more fear aggression than doogie does. they're on the same meds. he startles at so many random things, such as paper being moved or scooting a chair back. he has a bad time in my mom's craft space. he doesn't really like other dogs, but it isn't the bloodlust that reilly had, he's mostly just scared. he got taken out of puppy class after his surgery, and my mom was embarrassed about doogie wailing for the other dogs too much and wouldn't go back anyway. again, not the choice i would've made, but i don't make the decisions about the dogs. tav is very clingy, he always needs to be underfoot. he makes the saddest eyes with the flattest ears and tail wagging so low whenever he's upset, he is so good at the pathetic little guy act. he still tries to play with doogie a little too pushily, he is always waiting for doogie to jump or walk close enough to alligator snap at his feet or jowls or genitals... why. i'm hoping he matures more out of that. he is so, so talkative, more so when he was little. i miss it. he used to howl and yodel back at squeaky toys when he played with them, we called it singing the blues, it was so cute. he still talks back to us with loud yawns and vocalizing. he likes to pick up his leash when he's ready to head home and play some tug on the way back. he taught doogie how to bark at things outside, doog didn't make much noise before tav came along. he likes more foods than doogie, but he's still pretty picky. he used to hate snuggling, he doesn't like to be jostled, and he would grunt and groan if you woke him up. he still grunts and groans, but now he's better about letting me pat and kiss and hug him while he's sleepy. surprisingly, he still likes being picked up and carried after all his time in someone's arms after his surgery. which is good because i love carrying him around, he is perfectly arm sized. i am not his favorite person, my mom has more privileges with touching him and not being bitten, but i think i'm rising in his ranking. i love him very much, despite his bad attitude and ankle biting.