How we got where we are

Pascal said “the heart has reasons of which reason has no knowledge,” so on a snowy North Dakota Christmas Eve back in 1991 my husband Steve finally consented to my begging and we headed for the pound to look for a puppy.  Our three boys were in grammar school.  Being in the Air Force and moving all the time had always persuaded us to stay away from the “pet for the kids” scenario but for some unknown reason I felt it was time.

Moochies on Christmas Morn

I knew we didn’t want a little dog.  Nothing went yip, yip, but something that went woof, woof.  With no desire to have a pet that was not a part of our family I knew we would have a house dog.  As a full time mom and a volunteer at school I felt was up to all the trappings of dog ownership.   You might notice that most of this is written in the “I knew that we” format.  That would be because Steve thought we already had one dog too many and we didn’t have any at the time.  See Pascal above.  

At the pound of course we found lots of darling puppies and too many terribly sad adult dogs.  The pound will never be the place I frequent just to visit the dogs.  If I could save them all I would.  As we sorted through the puppies and younger dogs we found a little female 3-month-old golden/lab mix.  She was hiding as far back in the pen as she could and snuggled and gave lots of kisses when we picked her up.  This was the one.  When we took her up front we passed a cage with 6 darling white puffball puppies.  They were very young and the pound was looking for someone to puppy sit for two weeks.  

Three of the six puff balls

As if the joy of puppy sitting was not enough, the pound would give, for free (!?) one of the puppies.  Cool.  It was just that we wanted a woof, woof not a yip, yip.  I asked attendant about "puppy sitting" in exchange for the puppy we wanted.  It was late Christmas Eve, there were lots of people shopping for that  “pet for the kids” scenario, and the overwhelmed attendant hemmed and hawed, looked perplexed, over worked and distracted about the exchange but didn’t think it would be possible.  But, after some persuasion and pleading from our boys though, we happily walked out with lots of puppies, port-a-pen, and bags of puppy food.

Do you have any idea how much poop 7 puppies can produce?

We got all the puppies home and the “rental” puppies downstairs where they would live for two very long weeks.  The golden mix stayed with us so we could begin housebreaking her and make her a part of our family.  Like almost all puppies, she loved to give kisses and our youngest who called these kisses moochies instead of smooches christened the little girl Moochies.

There's that adorable puff ball pooping on presents.

On Christmas morning we brought the little puff balls upstairs to play with Moochies.  She was like Gulliver compared to them and the boys thought the whole experience was darling.  They were  pretty cute when they were playing hide and seek under the tree among the unopened presents. Moochies was knocking all the ornaments off the lower branches as she galumped after the other puppies. But, before long there was poop on all over the place.  Presents under the tree had suddenly acquired gross, icky and stinky decorations.  No one thought the puff balls were cute anymore. A mere 12 hours after bringing those adorable puff balls home the boys didn't think they were so cute.  

It was my job to pay for the adoption process by feeding, cleaning and occasionally taking those adorable puff balls out into the snowy yard to play with Moochies.  If you don't know about the northern tier of the United States, it gets LOTS of snow.  Deep snow!  And it stays for a LONG TIME!  So the 2 weeks we puppy sat seemed like forever.  I didn't take the puff balls outside much, mostly I cleaned the puppies cage and kept them in the basement with lots of air freshener. Moochie played in the basement whenever I was down there doing laundry.  She wore those poor babies out with her rough housing.

No one cried or even noticed when I returned the puffballs to the pound to be adopted by some lucky family.