Did Someone Say Puppies?

Puppies are coming.

Finally.

I have missed fostering puppies, but I just didn’t have the space or the time during our two-year relocation adventure. Now that we’re settled in the Shenandoah Valley, I’m ready.

Humongous thanks to my amazing husband, Nick, who helped me reimagine and redesign an old (like well over one hundred years old) cottage on our property. The cottage houses my office/foster dog space and includes a small kitchen, an area for cats, and a room especially for puppies.

What makes it ‘especially for puppies’? To start with, other than overhauling the electric, we didn’t tear our walls or install a permanent floor like we did in the other spaces. Instead, we cleaned up the old walls (a combination of ancient drywall with wallpaper and cheap paneling installed fifty years ago over some of those walls) and painted them. Someday when this isn’t a puppy room, we’ll do the real tear out, but for now we have a clean space that no one is going to freak out over if a puppy vomits/poops/claws/does-heaven-knows-what to the walls.

Not that they can reach the walls. I plan to put puppy fence around the room. Of course, anyone who has ever fostered puppies knows that projectile vomit and diarrhea are real, so it’s really just an illusion of a barrier in that sense.

Over the cement floor, Nick laid a piece of vinyl floor. In the pictures it looks rumpled, but that’s because it is angled up around the edges and attached to a small board beneath it. This will keep pee rivers from making their way underneath the vinyl. It also means that if (heaven forbid) we were to have a case of parvo, when we sanitize the room, we can simply remove the vinyl and put another piece down. (After the parvo nightmare of 2020, I’m a little paranoid.)

The room is brightly lit, will soon have shelving (up high out of puppy/mama dog reach) and a babygate installed in the doorway. Just outside the puppy room is a washer/dryer (key when it comes to fostering), and a small kitchen.

We are all ready for the three puppies who are coming on Sunday. They are ten weeks old and weigh 12-15 pounds. Now they just need names. I’ll be meeting a transporter from a shelter in West Virginia on Sunday, so stay tuned (or follow the Another Good Dog Facebook group) for live updates.

And what about those sweet foster dogs of mine? They’re still here patiently waiting for their families.

Argus is getting braver and more settled every day. He’s still puppy enough that I have to keep an eye on what he’s chewing, but he’s easily re-directed and gets upset when I swap out the inappropriate item for the appropriate one. I took him to town to walk with a friend and he did well – concerned about the new sights, but not freaked out. The only thing that really scared him was a cat that approached us!

Marley has adjusted quickly and kind of thinks she owns the place. She is a great communicator, so it’s been easy to meet her needs. She’s very happy to chew a bone indefinitely while I work, has never had an accident in the cottage, and loves everyone she meets (sometimes a little too much, but we’re working on the jumping up and thankfully, she’s not very big). That one blue eye makes her look a little worried all the time, but trust me, she’s not.

I’m hopeful they have lingered only because of the May slow-down. In my experience, adoptions tend to slow down in May because people are busy with graduations, end of year activities, etc., but once that’s done adoptions pick up because summer is usually a great time to adopt.

You can read about them in my previous posts here and here.

Until Each One Has a Home,

Cara

For information on me, my writing, and books, visit CaraWrites.com.

If you can’t get enough foster dog stories, check out my book: Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs . Or its follow up that takes you to the shelters in the south One Hundred Dogs & Counting: One Woman, Ten Thousand Miles, and a Journey Into the Heart of Shelters and Rescues.

If you’d like regular updates of all our foster dogs past and present, plus occasional dog care/training tips, and occasional foster cat updates (!) be sure to join the Facebook group, Another Good Dog.

And if you’d like to know where all these dogs come from and how you can help solve the crisis of too many unwanted dogs in our shelters, visit WhoWillLetTheDogsOut.org and subscribe to our blog where we share stories of our travels to shelters, rescues, and dog pounds.

I love to hear from readers and dog-hearted people! Email me at carasueachterberg@gmail.com.