This is a post I've put off for a while because I feel incredibly guilty. But if I am documenting my life and am honest about it, this was something that has affected our family in a pretty major way.
Before we moved here almost 3 years ago we talked about getting another dog. Our last two dogs were gone and we felt ready to get another one. Dominic was incredibly afraid of dogs and we didn't want that. So we looked at a dog that would be a perfect fit for our family. We chose a Basset Hound. They are slow moving (thus less scary to a small child), super sweet, and low to the ground. We had already started the adoption process for an adult dog when we got the job here in TN. The NC Basset Rescue doesn't do adoptions out of state. So we knew we would need to start over here. But when we moved in we found a Basset mom next door who had just had 11 puppies. It seemed providential.
Fast forward almost three years and Jon and I were done with these two dogs. One of them was still chewing every single thing in sight. But then she started nipping at the kids. She seemed to have lost her patience with them and would growl when they came around if she wasn't in the mood to be touched. It freaked them out and they'd stopped going out in the back yard. This was the complete opposite of what we'd intended. We had also dropped almost $2000 on one of them to get some items removed that she'd swallowed. So when the wild one got sick we jumped at the chance for her to be adopted out to a family without children. This left us with the sweet, calm one. Jon felt it would be cruel to leave her outside by herself after getting rid of her sister. So we brought her into the house in January. Caitlin and I almost immediately began having problems with our allergies again. We had to double up on our medicine. But I suffered through it. But after eating a ton of people food (sneaky little bugger) she proceeded to sneak into the dining room and use the restroom. Unfortunately we don't use the dining room often and I didn't find it for several days. After two hours I finally had the mess cleaned up. I called my sister to vent a little steam.
She begged me to bring the dog up to her. She'd apparently fallen in love with her when she visited the first time, but didn't want the wild one. We travel so much that just the idea of saving on boarding was enough for us to consider it. But the added benefit of no more allergies helped sway us as well.
So several weeks ago I took my sweet puppy to her new home. I'll be honest - it's part sad and part relief. I can plant flowers in my back yard. I don't have to arrange for boarding every time we leave. I can go back to occasionally taking my allergy medicine. There will be a ton less pet hair in the house. The vet bills will be considerably cheaper.
But I will miss those huge brown eyes and sweet doggy face. I will miss being a dog family. I will miss the way she loved my kids.
But I couldn't have asked for a better home for her and for that reason alone I'm glad that we made the hard decision to let her go. My sister is the perfect owner for our sweet puppy!
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