Stella is mos def the cream of our crop.  While not exactly the fruit of our loins, she still feels like our one and only child.  RK sent me photos today that he'd taken of Stella for a neighborhood 'cute dog' contest and when I saw them, my stomach got butterflies.  True Love.

So, a week ago, when she had a near-death experience, I nearly died myself.

We bought a huge-mongous, old, 70-pound mirror at a garage sale a couple weeks ago.  It took us awhile to put it up because it was so unruly and we wanted to make sure we got it right.  There was another, smaller mirror hanging on the wall above the piano and we decided it would look amazing up there and switched them out.  We definitely struggled a bit to make it work:  the wall wouldn't hold, at first we hit a post of some kind behind the sheetrock, we moved the hook higher and higher, not loving it but decided it would be safest.  It was a hard play to get it up there, as we stretched our bodies across the piano, RK holding this ridiculously heavy thing and me, reaching for the hook on the wall.  But all this was nothing, compared to the moment the damn thing came crashing down.

Stella plays on a little rug below the piano.  It's the only rug we have in the whole house and it's where it is because a couple of years ago the beautiful wood floors were terribly damaged in a flood from the upstairs apartment and now warp upwards.  But Stella doesn't know that.  She just knows that it's the one place where she can safely roll around and play with her toys without slipping on the non-grippy wood floors.

This was Stella on that morning:

and this was that same area, about two hours later:

Sick. Sick. Sick.  When we came running from the other room, I could barely believe my eyes.  Stella had escaped it, but just barely.  She was sitting across the room, shaking, crying.  It was just horrific.  When the mirror went, it pulled down everything on, near, or even hanging-by with it.  We lost some things that, in the past, had seemed special to us, but none of it was even a blip of importance at that moment as long as we had Stella.

Dang, this animal-attachment thing is intense.