New Home

We drove all day today to go get Baby and bring her home. She is fabulous.

The owner decided to try to keep the chi-pom with her, so she didn't come home with us. That dog wouldn't have been a good fit for our family anyway--too strongheaded, high-wired, yappy, independent and slightly aggressive.

Baby is very worried right now that we are going to leave her, which is understandable. I'm going to have to get some advice on dealing with severe separation anxiety. We are going to either go to church in shifts tomorrow or one of us will stay home with her. We'll probably start working with her by gradually having her spend increasing amounts of time in a crate, starting with short periods and working up to longer times until she understands that we are not going to abandon her. First I have to figure out if I can get her into a crate. :)

She was so unhappy when we got home and I told her, "This is home. This is your home now." Her head and tail drooped and she didn't want to come into the house. She wanted to go to the home that she knew. Poor Baby.

Ebee is the only one who really likes Baby's name, so we're thinking about changing it. DH and two older girls want to call her Lady. I think that name is a bit too common for dogs, but I might be willing to compromise with it unless I can come up with something that we all like better. At least it sounds similar to the name she's used to. I like the name Daisy, too.

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She is so amazingly smart. And beautiful, and sweet. She is a bit protective of her people; we'll have to wait and see how much if any of an issue that will be. She is obviously very in-tune with her person and their emotions.

She came without a collar or leash . . . the previous owner hadn't used either on her for so long that she didn't even have any. Baby was a bit uncertain about the collar and leash when I first put them on her, but was ok with them. She doesn't pull excessively on the leash. She seems to already know how to heel on the left side.

She really does fetch things, including the remote, and she is quite tall standing on her hind paws to reach things. We're going to have to guard the kitchen counters, as she has already demonstrated that she can easily reach them. :)

She's very talented at catching pieces of food tossed into the air, and happily does tricks for food. So far I've seen her shake, sit up and beg, sit, lay down and come with alacrity. She's supposed to be able to count to any number up to 10, but hasn't shown us this trick yet.

She is quite polite. She has not tried to drink out of Kelly's bowl, only her own. She stands and waits at the side of the car until you tell her to get in. She was used to sitting in the passenger seat in the car, and at first every time one of us got out of the van she would jump into the empty seat. But it only took making her get down a couple of times before she understood that she wasn't supposed to sit there.

If you spread out a blanket and tell her to lay down on it, she will lay on it instead of the carpet.

One of her favorite pastimes at her last home was attempting to herd the landlord's horses, so we'll have to see how high her prey drive is. Hopefully she won't try to herd the kids. She hasn't tried to jump on the kids at all or be anything but extremely gentle and quiet with them. She will fetch a toy and bring it back to them.

I'm guessing she's not a big chewer, because her two favorite toys that she brought along with her are both stuffed toys in quite good condition.

She is quite thin . . . it doesn't look that way so much on first glance because her fur is beautiful and fluffy. But every knob in her spine sticks out, it's very easy to feel her ribs, and her sides are like gullies next to where her hips stick out. She was so hungry, she gulped down all the food we gave her. I'm not sure how much it's ok to feed her. We'll have to ask the vet about that.

I got some canned dog food that is basically meat with a few vegetables and added vitamins, and the highest-quality dry dog food I could find (mostly meat, and no grains except rice). She has been eating exclusively table scraps for a while, the lady said, because she couldn't afford to buy the dry food that she used to feed her. Baby devoured a can of dog food, a 5-piece chicken nuggets (her favorite treats, we were told, were Hot Wings and chicken nuggets), and some dry dog food, then took about 3 minutes to demolish a large Nylabone edible chew.

Baby's 6-week-old puppies (her second litter) were just taken away from her a couple of days ago, and she is quite engorged and dripping vast quantities of milk everywhere. I'm told we'll have to wait until her milk dries up before she can be spayed.

She has cheat grass sores on her feet that look quite painful, too--I need to figure out what we can do for that while we wait for her vet appointment Tuesday morning. I don't even know what cheat grass is. The tops of her toes and the areas between her toes are swollen and painful-looking, and at least one is oozing pus, but they are a normal color of pink--not red or purple or anything. She has licked the skin off the sore parts, and you can see the marks where it looks like something (cheat grass?) is embedded in the skin.

Her coat and skin and everything else otherwise look quite healthy, though. She doesn't seem to have any fleas or ticks. She does shed a lot, but we can handle that. :)

The previous owner said that she was born November 15th, 2006, but the vet records she gave us show that she got her first set of puppy shots in the first week of September 2006. So she appears to be just over age 2. She is due for all her shots, but did get the full set of puppy shots (and worming) and has had a Rabies vaccine recently enough that it's unlikely to have worn off yet. It's so helpful to have all her vet records.

The lady who had her said that Baby's mother was a collie and the father was a "big black St. Bernard." I don't think there's any such thing as a black St. Bernard, and she doesn't look at all like she has Newfoundland or St. Bernard in her, so I'm not sure if that's accurate or not. I'm just calling her a collie mix for now. :) She is brown and white, with long black fringing on her ears. Her skin is pink with dark spots on it, but the spots on her skin don't coincide with the spots in her fur. She is about 23" tall at the shoulder.

She gets along ok with Kelly, Morning's dog that we're dogsitting. (I checked with Morning to make sure it was OK to introduce them, since they were acting like they really wanted to meet each other.) They're about the same size, but Kelly weighs a lot more of course.

Kelly was so excited to see Baby and wanted to play with her, but Baby just sniffed her and then pretty much ignored her. Kelly was slightly disappointed and then went back to lounging around. They both seem quite comfortable around each other, but they're not going out of their way to interact. Baby doesn't like it when one of us pets Kelly and is not petting Baby. :) She doesn't try to hurt Kelly, but she does try to push her way between us to edge Kelly out.

Baby was slightly nervous around DH at first (she lived with an abusive man in the past, from what we were told), but as soon as she realized that he was gentle, soft-spoken, and kind she latched onto him. She's spent much of the evening sitting on his feet. DH, the dog and kid magnet, wins again. LOL.

Containing her is going to be a challenge--at least if we're trying to contain her away from us. She already figured out how to open the bathroom door and the baby gate, and she panicks when she's left alone. She wants to be right with us--preferably touching us--at all times.

We got out a large crate we were hoping she would feel secure with and use as a den, but she was uninterested and Kelly (who hasn't been crated before, at least in the time Morning has had her) immediately claimed it and hasn't budged from it since. She seems very happy in it. I'm guessing she must have been crate-trained as a puppy.

I'm noticing lots of little things, like that Baby took forever to go to the bathroom. She wouldn't go no matter how many times I tried to take her potty until she finally HAD to go on the grass. She cringed just a bit as she was going, then visibly relaxed when I praised her. Apparently she wasn't sure if we were going to get after her for pottying or not.

She is going to have to get used to our soft-spoken ways. She's used to being spoken to repeatedly and with growing intensity in both Spanish and English until she does something, from what we saw. She does seem to respond better to Spanish than to English, so it comes in handy that I speak a little Spanish. She picks up anything so quickly, though, that I don't think she'll have any trouble transitioning to English.

She's not at all food-defensive, and let me take her edible Nylabone briefly and then give it back to her with no trouble. She did growl at me slightly when I first got out of the van when we arrived. I think she sensed that her owner was upset to see me, because she was holding back tears at having to hand over her dog. As soon as the lady told her I was a friend and shook my hand, she was fine. So we'll definitely have to keep an eye on that. We're not going to have the kids around her unsupervised, and will be closely involved with any interactions for the forseeable future, just because we don't want to take any chances.

She is a sensitive soul, and responds very well to praise and rewards, and so far she listens well to being told "no." (We'll see how mischevious she gets once she gets more comfortable here--she could definitely keep us hopping with her intelligence and abilities!) She'll fit right in with our parenting style, I think--we prefer to focus on instruction and praise and non-punitive consequences rather than punishments even with our kids.

I'm thanking the Lord for sending us this dog. I know we're in for some challenges, and I'm sure we'll face some unexpected hurdles. But I think Baby is perfect for us. The previous owner told me that she had been praying every night that she would be able to find a nice family with children who would love and care for Baby, and we've certainly been praying for the right dog for our family.

I can't wait to see how things progress as she gets more comfortable with us.

Just now she got up and stared at me, made a low almost growling noise in her throat, and waited. When that didn't bring the results she wanted, she gave a low, short bark, still staring at me intently. I said, "What is it, Baby? What do you want?" and she started toward the doorway, looking back to make sure I was following, and tried to lead me down to the kitchen. She was hungry again.