Two years ago, a clock started ticking. My biological clock decided to ignore the whole baby thing and focus itself on dogs. Big dogs, little dogs, puppies and adult. Fluffy, short hair, yippy, drooly, you name it. If it was a dog, I wanted it. If I saw a puppy, I got this craving in my gut that made me consider grabbing it and running far, far away. Remember that dog food commercial about dog adoption, the one where the dog says “I’m a good dog, I just want to go home”? That one made me cry more than once.
I begged Kevin to let me have a dog on a near daily basis, despite the fact that we were living in a tiny one bedroom apartment with three cats already. (Three cats who I love and adore, but they did nothing to make me want a dog any less.) He kept being rational and saying no; something about it not being allowed on our lease and the apartment being too crowded, blah blah blah. I return, I pouted and whined for two years. (The man is kind of a saint.)
But then earlier this year, a friend called me and told me that the complex she was moving into had an apartment open…2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, cathedral ceilings in the living room, and best of all? No pet limits. We could keep all three cats AND get a dog.
I signed the deposit paperwork a few days later.
We moved in at the end of May and if I could have, I would have picked out a dog within moments of unpacking the last box. But I had to wait until my summer of travel was over. So two long, interminable months later I dragged Kevin down to the county animal shelter to look at dogs. And in the very first cage in the very first kennel we walked into we found her:
They had named her Poquita; she’d been in the shelter for a month, and they had found her roaming the streets. She had this worried look on her face when she looked up at us; we found out later that the worried look is her default look. The shelter people said she shouldn’t go to a home with small kids because she had a defensive fear response. (We have since discovered that she is just fine with small kids. Grown ups who are strangers still make her nervous though.) But we took her out into the “get to know you” pen and she wandered around sniffing things and laid in the sun and let us pick her up and gave us a look that said “You’ll work for me.”
So we signed the paperwork and they spayed her and sent her home with us, anthe first thing we did was change her name to Sophie. And within 72 hours, she had inserted her scrawny little 10 pound self right into our hearts. Kevin, who had insisted upon saying that any dog we got would be MY DOG (as opposed to the family dog), picked her up one day and said “I’m going to hold you because you’re OUR DOG, not just HER DOG.” And with that, it was done. Miss Sophie, the funniest,cutest little Chihuahua Dachschund ever, was part of the family. And all of a sudden my life was all about dog toys and crate training and sweaters and training classes and dog park.
And I have never ever been happier. Sophie and Vivi play with each other all night, every night. We come home and she leaps around us with such unbridled joy that I can’t help but smile, no matter how bad my day was before I got home. She comes with us to brunch, and people ooh and aww over how cute she is. At the dogpark, she has a best friend named Noodles, an Italian Greyhound who is the only one that runs as fast as Sophie. Her pack includes Laura’s two pugs, and she is the boss of them. The only cat she is afraid of is Riley, which is hilarious because he is the most chicken cat in the world. And we’ve fattened her up to a respectable 13 pounds.
She’s curled up right next to me right now, which is her default position if I am sitting on the couch. (She’s dreaming of I think, because her feet are twitching and she lets out a yip every so often.) Every time we leave, she gives us a look we call The Face. She loves us more unconditionally than we deserve, and she’s so, so happy. And it may seem like we did a really good deed by rescuing a sad little shelter dog and making her fat and happy, but really, she is the one doing the good deed because she’s the one who completed our little family.
