September 13, 2013 - August 27, 2023

Our shop dog, Ralph, passed away on Sunday. It was a sad day.

Our little Ralph was not always named Ralph. If you've seen The Muppet Show, there is a part of the movie where they meet the really big muppet named Sweetums who works at the car dealership. Sweetums' boss refers to him as Jack so when Kermit calls him Jack, Sweetums replies, "Jack not name, Jack job." This will always remind me of Ralph because when we got him, back in April of 2014, his name was Carl. Ralph was a name that he got a little later in life after earning it.

Ralph was born in Ohio on September 13, 2013, and his original owner named him Truffles. That owner didn't have Ralph long before giving him away to a kid who was about ready to go off to college who renamed him Carl. This kid left Carl with his parents to care for him, and his dad worked with Keith, my husband. After caring for Carl for a couple of months they realized it wasn't going to work out. In April 2014, he told Keith that if we wanted a dog we could have him. We said yes and he brought Ralph over to make sure he would get along with our kids. All went well and we became Ralph's family. Little Carl was 6 months old. 

When we first got Ralph, we thought about changing his name but never could think of a different name that fit him, so he remained Carl. It wasn't until we were moving that we had to take Ralph on a lot of car rides. First, it was car rides while people were looking at our house and eventually it was a long car ride while we moved across the country. As we were taking all these car rides, we realized our little dog was a barfer. He could not hold his lunch in the car at all. He has always had some gag reaction problems, but car rides were the worst. We had to have things to clean it up with along for the ride or it was not good. So, Carl became Carl Ralph, and soon he became Cralph, and by the time we moved to Texas in December 2014, he was just Ralph. 

Ralph was always a good sport and played well with the kids. He liked it when they dressed him up and he loved wearing bandanas. One of my favorite pictures of him is when my son put his Spiderman mask on Ralph. 

This dog went through all the stages with us. When he was young he would bark at people and act like he was going to bite them. I used to have to put a muzzle on him to take him to the vet. Luckily he grew out of that stage fairly quickly, but he did continue to bark at people. I had a pest control guy who came by monthly that Ralph would bark at for several minutes. This guy was great and really liked Ralph, he would let him get it out of his system and then pet him and laugh about how after coming every month for years the dog would still do the same thing. 

We've had two other dogs since having Ralph. We had Zoey, the Chihuahua who was with us from June 2017 - December 2021. Ralph and Zoey got along really well. Ralph was the boss and Zoey didn't mind. We got Sammy July 2022. Sammy was a little dog with a lot of personality and a little bit of a tough pill for Ralph to swallow. Even when she was smaller than him, she was still the boss. Ralph never really liked that. They eventually did learn to get along, but they never had the same bond as Ralph had with Zoey. 

 Ralph was such a part of our family, we thought he would live forever. At almost 10, we just thought he was getting old. He acted like he was 90. On his last vet visit, we mentioned how old he seemed and the Dr. was surprised and said he was more like middle age. When I think about when he started going downhill, I can't really pinpoint it. When Zoey died, he was really sad. Could it have been then? At some point, he started drinking way more water than before. Could it have been then? Or maybe it was when we got Sammy and she rough-housed him. Last summer he had a heat stroke and nearly died. It could have been then. Several weeks ago poor Ralph got really bad. He could no longer control himself at night so we had to start putting him in his crate. Soon after he started getting really sick almost every night and eventually every single night. He became less and less active and his sweet little body started giving out on him. 

We thank God for the gift of Ralph in our lives. We love him forever and are so happy we got to grow up with him.

-Rachel