Sadie Meets Mr. B-Natural

I snuck Sadie in to the "liberry" to meet the staff. They'd heard enough about her, it was time to get some one on one time.

I'd been careful when I arrived to do a quick visual check for Mr. B-Natural's car in the parking lot, but we had a lot of cars there at the time, so I couldn't be sure. After the understandable fuss he made over various dogs that had been allowed in the building when his flea-ridden pooch Bubba had been banned, I knew he wouldn't like Sadie getting special treatment.

Sadie stayed in the staff workroom as each of the staff came in to love on her and pet the new baby dog. She was on her best behavior, didn't piddle in the floor, didn't bite anyone, and was loved and adored by one and all who saw her, including several patrons who happened to spy her through the open staff-workroom door. Eventually Sadie, with no one holding her leash, became curious enough to venture beyond the staff workroom door, then through the opening by the circ-desk and started out into the library itself.

"Oh! Oh! Better not," Ms. M whispered to me. She pointed out toward the long desk of internet stations where Mr. B-Natural sat, computing away, his back to us. I pulled Sadie back into the workroom and closed the door.

After Sadie had said hello to everyone and had even gone "big bathroom" outside, with Mrs. A there to hold her leash, it was time to leave and I hauled her out the loading area door.

As I came around the corner of the building and was headed across the grass toward my car, I happened to look over toward the front entrance of the building and saw Mr. B-Natural exit from it. He, in turn, looked over and saw us. From his perspective, I clearly had a dog on a leash and was clearly exiting the interior of the building with said dog. I waited for the inevitable grunting and growling, but instead Mr. B-Natural grinned at me and came walking over. So I turned and pulled Sadie toward him, meeting mid-way toward the front door.

Mr. B-Natural squatted down and petted Sadie.

"What sorta dog is it?" he asked.

"St. Bernard mix," I said.

"Oh, gonna be a big one," he said. Then, looking up at me with deep seriousness in his face, he said, "One thing you'll have to get used to though..."

"Yeah?"

"The shedding."

"Oh, yeah," I said. I explained that my wife had had a saint before and despite the fact that she'd died nearly nine years and four moves ago, we could probably still come up with some of her hair.

He gave Sadie a final pat on the head and walked away, as happy as the grumpiest old man in all the world can be.

Growing Family (PART 2)

So the wife and I have been discussing the dog situation on and off over the last few weeks. Again, I thought the discussions would only come to fruition AFTER we'd moved to Borderland. It seemed insane to do otherwise, not only because getting a dog would complicate the move but also because we're not supposed to have dogs at all in our current place in Tri-Metro.

Then I came home from work last week to find my wife in a very good mood. She grinned and said, "I've been doing searches on the internet. You should go see what's on your screen."

Immediately, I knew it would be a dog. And I knew that dog would be a Saint. I hung my head and trudged to my office and sat down. When my screen saver vanished I saw the face at right staring back at me. It was a 6 to 8 week old St. Bernard mixed puppy that was at a humane society a couplea-three counties away. Her name was Sadie.

My heart both sunk and rose at the same time because: A) I knew there would be no argument that could sway my wife away from getting this dog; and B) I didn't care.

I walked back to the kitchen where the wife was waiting, eagerly looking to see the expression on my face. She practically clapped when she did.

"You know, if you wanted to get that dog," I said, "I wouldn't put up much of a fight."

We phoned the humane society the following day and put Sadie on reserve. She was supposed to wait until May 19 before she could be adopted, but because that humane society is closed on May 19, they said we could come on May 17. We lit out first thing Saturday morning.

The lady at the administration office of the couplea-three-counties-away-humane society asked us if we'd been down to the kennel section to see Sadie. We had not, as we'd been told to go to administration first. She told us we'd better go look at her to make sure we wanted her. To see if we wanted her? That sounded so insane to us. We already loved this dog and we'd only seen her picture. But we decided to humor the lady. We drove down to the kennel, averting our eyes so as not to see all the other dogs in their cages and endanger ourselves of going home with more than one. (This was a really nice humane society, by the way, situated in a very scenic county park.) Sadie was kept in the puppy/small dog section, within a concrete block building. We told the lady we were there to see Sadie. She led us into a little hall lined with cages. We kept our eyes locked only on the cage she was pointing to and within seconds we were staring at our new dog. There she was, standing up on all fours, some newspaper spread in the bottom of her cage, a bit of puppy poo smeared on her butt where she'd sat in it.

Ashley stuck her fingers through the bars and Sadie playfully licked and nipped at them. Ashley then asked if it was okay to open the cage and the attendant said it was. She reached in and petted Sadie and then I put my hand up to be sniffed and it was instead licked. That was it. As I would learn later, Ash made up her mind in that moment that there was no way we were leaving without that puppy.

"We'll be right back in just a minute and then you're coming home with us," Ashley told Sadie in a low voice.

It took only a little bit of paperwork, a check for $100 and a promise to return in a month to have her spayed, and Sadie was ours. As we went back to the kennel to pick her up, we asked the attendant if there was any idea what sort of mix Sadie was beyond St. Bernard. Her coloration is strictly black and white and saints usually have brown or reddish mixed in. I was hoping it would be a decidedly non-drooly dog, because that's one of my main memories of the wife's former pooch, Honey Bee. The wife pointed out that she could hardly be mixed with a MORE-drooly dog, so anything might be an improvement. The attendant theorized a couple of things, but we've since decided it might be border collie. Sadie has a certain look about her eyes in common with the border collie owned by some friends of ours. If she is, she'll likely grow up to be large and smart.

As you can see from this picture taken at our new place in Borderland, Sadie is cuteness incarnate. She can just take your breath away with how adorable she is. Not unexpectedly, her current nicknames are Piddles McGillicuddy and Poopsy Collins, for her repeated excretory missteps. Whatayagonnado? She's a puppy.

Sadie is very sweet, when she's not busy trying to teethe on our fingers, hands and arms. She follows us everywhere and doesn't like it when even one of us leaves the room, let alone the house. She likes her new pack all together.

Though we have friends that swear by it, neither of us are big fans of crating animals. However, on our first night with Sadie, after her long exciting day, we noticed her trying to climb into our lower kitchen cabinets to find a place to go to sleep. At that point, the wife dashed over to Wally World and picked up one of those collapsible, nylon doggie tents. She went right in and fell asleep. Much like with Baby Ian, we've been getting up twice in the night to let her go potty outside. And after three days with us, she no longer pees by the door while waiting to get out.

Being a puppy, she's often a bundle of energy and prone to biting and wrestling fits. When she starts getting too bitey with us (we have the wounds to show for it) we put her on the floor and set to ignoring her. Quite amusingly, she often takes out her frustration on her food dishes, hauling them around the room in her mouth, growling and flinging them and barking wildly, making as much noise as she can. When she's finished (and when we've caught our breaths from laughing at her) she trots back over and falls asleep at our feet.

On Sunday morning, we hauled Sadie back to Tri-Metro, where there's less carpet to endanger. She travels well, which is good, cause there's going to be a good deal of traveling for her in the next few weeks.

We're cherishing these moments when she's still relatively tiny. And to keep her as tiny as we can for as long as we can (I'd really prefer a Bonsai St. Bernard) we're following the current research in large breed dogs and feeding her Iams Extry Huge Dog Puppy Formula. The old theory used to be that you had to load large breed puppies up with calcium and calories to help them grow. Due to problems such as Honey Bee suffered from, though, it's now thought that limiting caloric intake is a good idea, to help give them time to fully develop internally. So she's got two years of this puppy food in front of her.

We love our new baby.

Growing Family (PART 1)

Since we're soon to move to our new place in Borderland, the wife has been making noise about getting a dog. We've had this discussion many times in the past, but have never lived in an apartment or house that would allow such creatures. So it's been a dream we hoped to realize "some day" when we had a "place of our own" and could "do whatever we want." And while I've campaigned for something smallish, like a beagle, a puggle or, perhaps, a Spuds Mackenzie dog, the wife has had a larger vision. Much larger. She wants a St. Bernard.

Back when the wife lived in Alaska and was just starting out living on her own, she wanted a St. Bernard in a bad way. The unfortunate part, though, is that she didn't have much money to live on herself, let alone being able to afford to buy dog food for an enormous dog or, for that matter, afford to purchase said enormous dog in the first place. But she dearly wanted one all the same. As the story goes, her mother (hi, Ma!) spotted an ad for a St. Bernard that was a year and a half old and going fairly cheap, all things considered. The owners had hoped to use her as a show dog, but she had something of an under bite that would have prevented her from qualifying as best of breed, so they'd decided to let her go. Ma called the wife and told her about the ad. The wife, of course, began freaking out. This was her big chance to finally have a St. Bernard at a very reasonable price--only she didn't know if she was about to make a colossally bad move by buying it. Would she be able to afford it? Would she be able to care for it the way it would need? Would buying it cause the both of them to starve?

On her journey out to the farm where the dog resided, my wife prayed to God that he would give her a sign that this was the right move. It couldn't be a namby-pamby, open to interpretation sign, either, but had to be a clear cut spotlight shining brightly on the answer of whether or not to buy this dog.

When the wife arrived at the farm and got out of the car, a St. Bernard came bounding up to her, jumped through the open driver's side door, crawled across and sat down in the passenger seat.

"Looks like you have a dog," the owner said.

Looks like she did.

The dog, whose given name was Bellis Fair, because she was purchased in the Bellis Fair Mall in Bellingham, WA, was soon nicknamed Honey Bee and the name stuck. Honey Bee was instantly a beloved part of my wife's life. And, yes, there were times when the wife had to decide between buying people food or dog food, because she couldn't afford both, but in those cases she simply made extra people food and shared with the dog.

Honey Bee stayed in Alaska when my wife came to Mississippi to study at Blue Mountain College. After she'd finished her class work, though, and had moved into the Festering Hellhole apartment near Tupelo to continue her medical technologist training at the North Mississippi Medical Center, her dad flew down from Alaska with Honey Bee and the dog stayed to keep her company. (That poor dog had probably never seen temperatures above 85 degrees in her life, only to be thrust into the land of 110 degree heat indexes, with the humidity turned up to 11.) Eventually, I met the two of them when I too moved into the Festering Hellhole. In fact, it was my rescue of Honey Bee after she'd gotten free of her collar and run chain that helped cement me in my future wife's affections. Without that incident, I might not be married to her today.

The future wife and Honey Bee eventually moved to North Carolina, we eventually began dating long-distance and had been doing so for just over a year when Ashley called to tell me that Honey Bee had died. It seems that big dogs grow so fast that often their internal organs don't have time to grow the kind of support structures to hold them in place. After Ashley went out to feed her one evening, her stomach had simply turned on itself and the vet said that there was nothing that could have been done to save her, even if they'd known what was happening at the time. It was a devastating loss for Ashley. They'd been through so much together.

Since then, as I mentioned, the wife has wanted another saint and I knew she would eventually get one. And by "eventually" I meant, y'know, a few weeks/months after we'd moved into our new place in Borderland and got everything unpacked and settled out. Fate had other plans.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)