Our adventures as a foster dog family
It has been a long time since I brought in a new foster dog. April to be exact.
(Which makes me wonder what I’ve been writing on this blog for all these months!)
There is a very special dog in my kitchen. She arrives with a story that began back in June. A story that inspired me to return to Tennessee and go on to Alabama and to now explore more ways I can change the situation.
You may recognize her face… Continue reading “Home Again with a Stowaway”
I’ve wondered what I will write about now that we are holding steady with the same two foster dogs. I could tell you more about Flannery and how entertaining she is—how she chases her tail on a near daily basis, how her enthusiasm for her supper knows no bounds, how she zips around outside like an oversize hummingbird and comes the moment she is called. (And don’t worry, in that second video she totally takes out my husband but he is fine). Continue reading “We’re All ‘Complicated’”
This is a long-overdue post to catch you up on Daisy’s Diary of a Rescue.
Truly, I did not imagine I would still be writing this Diary almost six months later. But maybe that’s the piece of rescue that is hardest – they are all good dogs, but some require a little more of us than others.
Sometimes you rescue a dog from a shelter, imagining it’s shiny new future now that it is ‘out’, but Continue reading “Diary of a Rescue: Month Six”
We have a very special guest with us this week. (As if four dogs wasn’t enough!)
Oreo and I go way back to the day I met him in a shelter in North Carolina, where he’d been living on and off for over a year. He’d been adopted out twice, but neither adopter chose to neuter him or bring him inside, so he ran off (as unneutered male dogs are want to do) and Animal Control returned him to the shelter each time.
There was something special about Oreo—the way he looked at us, the way he leaned into his kennel fence desperate for your touch, and how he’d hold your hand through the fence.
It was a long and winding road from that day Continue reading “Our Special Visitor”
I owe you an update.
From my perspective, I’ve been to the moon and back this past month emotionally. Between losing my precious pup Frankie and witnessing all that I saw in Tennessee, our foster dogs have been an afterthought, at least in terms of writing. Yet they’ve been here all along demanding care and attention, an anchor preventing me from being washed away by the sadness. So here’s what’s happening with all of them. Continue reading “The State of Our Pack”
I am still struggling on a daily basis to accept that Frankie is gone. To say I miss him doesn’t even begin to touch what I feel. Caring for the other dogs gets me out of bed, but moving forward? That seemed out of reach. I need to do something with my grief – so the trip that Ian and I have been planning since winter has been the perfect panacea.
I had hoped to share about this trip weeks ago, but like so much else in my life right now, it was pushed aside. We’ve shortened our originally planned trip in terms of days and distance, but it feels right to be doing this now and I’m grateful for the distraction and the chance to do something to honor Frankie.
Ian is my 17-year-old son, my youngest.
He’s my baby, despite the fact that Continue reading “I Just Can’t Wait to Get on the Road Again…”
It would be very easy to keep Flannery. I’d love to foster fail and make her a permanent part of our pack.
Undoubtably, she fits in here just fine. Continue reading “Flannery, Flannery, Flannery—what will we do with Flannery?”
When I started this diary, I thought it would go for about ten, maybe twelve weeks. I figured eight or ten weeks until the puppies went home and then another week or two after that for the adorable mama I saw in the photos to be adopted. As you all know, nothing went according to plan. And now, here we are at just over twelve weeks and Continue reading “Diary of a Rescue Weeks Eleven and Twelve: This has gone on Long Enough”
Sitting down to write this morning, I’m debating with myself how much I should tell you. There are times during this fostering experience when the difficulties stretch my commitment thin as tinsel and I am certain it will snap.
I don’t blame the dogs or OPH or even the wrongness of the necessity of the work we do. I occasionally blame my husband, because Continue reading “Foster Dog Overwhelm: Saving Dogs Even When Your House (and heart) are Full”
The natural instincts of animals are remarkable. Spending so many of my hours with animals in the course of a lifetime, I’ve come to respect this, but I’ve also come to wonder at length about human instinct and whether we are compelled to follow it the way animals do, but that is decidedly a topic for another post.
A week ago today, I had just finished a post about Thelma’s arrival and the happenings in this foster house, when Continue reading “A Mama’s Instinct”
Another Good Dog™ 