Free Dog - Chapter 1

There is just so much to say about our FREE dog that I have been avoiding blogging about it.
I have decided to do it in a series. Hopefully this will make it more manageable. Kinda like when your kids start to get older and their bedtime stories become chapter books, you read one or two chapters a nite. So I will begin this series, and as regularly as I can will blog until the story is finished. I will try to keep the chapters short and I will include pics whenever available.
Enjoy.

In the beginning….
A brief history.
Years ago we had a black, pure bred Lab named Rikki (Rikki Tikki Tavi). She was a phenomenal dog. She was that dog that would lay on the porch with you or catch and return anything you threw and follow you everywhere (sometimes she used to follow behind the tractor as I cut the grass …back and forth, back and forth). She helped Ferris to learn to walk …he used to pull himself to a standing position by grabbing her fur. She never flinched. The girls (the daughter and my sister in law…who we used to refer to as ‘the girls’) used to put hats on her and make her be in their Barbie movies. Rikki was a remarkable dog. I know that now more than ever.
We lost Rikki when she was 10 years old to our busy street. Black dog at night running across the street… it was my fault … I let her out and expected her to stay in the yard as she usual. She didn’t.
We miss dear Rikki.

After Rikki died, well, we still had Julia…who is really just a tiny replication of a dog. She is a 6 pound mini-pincher. And she never really filled the ‘dog’ requirements.

So I suppose there was always a hole in our lives.
Oh, about 2 years later, the daughter comes home with some information about some lab puppies at a local pound. I really can’t tell you what possessed us to go and look…but we did.

Now, dogs from the pound are FREE, which seemed such a deal after the hundreds of dollars spent on our last dog. We had to go through a rigorous interview process to be sure we were going to provide her with a suitable home. I was actually nervous. We plotted and conspired on how to answer questions so that we would pass, so that we would be granted permission to take home a FREE puppy. We assured the animal control officer we were not the type of family to simply give up when the dog started chewing or barking or shedding. We were competent dog owners and there was no way this dog would be returned to the pound or tied out in the yard all by herself in the cold. We were RESPONSIBLE dog owners.

This is the puppy we chose at the pound.