A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

This introduction is long overdue, but I figured it’s better late than never. Actually to be honest I didn’t want to introduce our new puppy Simone because she was so annoying in the first few months that I wasn’t opposed to sending her back to where she came from. Ha! But like all pets that tend to be an annoyance at the beginning, they usually end up growing on you. So with this post I can safely say that Simone will be with us for the long haul.

You may be thinking that Michelle and I have lost our minds in getting a second puppy, but there was a logical reason for it. Since both of us work full-time we were feeling guilty about leaving Darwin home alone during the day. We thought he would be much happier with a companion while we were away. We also thought it would be good for the two of us so that Darwin wouldn’t be looking for 100% of our attention.

We had joked about asking the breeder if she was willing to sell us his sister (since they got along so well when we left Darwin there when we were away), but we knew that Simone was being prepped for the show-dog circuit. Then one day out of the blue the breeder called and asked us if we were interested in buying Simone. It turned out that her body was a little bit long for what she was looking for in a show-dog. After a lot of deliberation Michelle and I decided to take her up on the offer. The brother and sister duo were going to be reunited (they are both from the same litter).

With the arrival of Simone, Darwin was a little bit ticked now that he had to share our love, but he did eventually warm up to her. The main problem was that Simone would not sleep through the night, plus we were having difficulties house-training her. It started to become pretty frustrating having to wake up at 3 am every night to take her outside. But after continuing with our training I’m happy to say that she has recently started to sleep through the entire night, and her house-training is nearly complete.

So everything is almost as we had envisioned it would be with a second dog. Darwin gets to hang out with his sister all day and the two make a pretty dynamic (and hilarious) duo. But something that hasn’t worked out is that instead of one dog insisting on 100% of our attention, we now have two demanding 100% of our attention.

About five months ago Michelle and I were visiting the Fenrichs up at their cottage at Turtle Lake. I wasn’t feeling well so I just lazed around, mostly laying on the couch. Zoey and Molly, the Fenrich’s two dogs, must have thought I looked pretty comfortable sleeping there, so they jumped up on me and joined me.

Up until this point I had no real interest in getting a dog, but having those two dogs cuddle with me set something off. I knew Michelle was more of a cat person so I started bugging her that we should get a dog - specifically a Chihuahua. It actually started off as a joke, but a few weeks later I found out that Michelle had been talking with breeders. It seemed my joke actually gained some traction. The next thing I knew we were at a dog show in Saskatoon to meet some Chihuahuas from a breeder in Regina.

We officially made the decision to bring a dog into our house and started dealing with Rosalie Juravle-Clark of Happy Paws Dog Care in Regina. We really liked the integrity and philosophy of her breeding practices and knew that we would get a quality puppy from her.

Two weeks ago Michelle and I made a trip to Regina to meet the puppies. Even though they were only nine weeks along, neither of us could believe how small they were. We spent about an hour playing with the dogs before heading out. After some discussion we decided on a little male from the litter. Rosalie told us we could pick in two weeks.

And today we made a quick trip to Regina to pick up our new puppy. We were a little worried as to how he would behave in the two-and-a-half hour car ride to Saskatoon, but he had a grand ole’ time playing with Michelle the whole way back. He’s been with us for about eight hours now and has been a blast as he awkwardly runs and jumps around the house . So may I take this time to officially introduce you to Dragomir Chirpy Tiberius. That’s actually his registered name, so you can just call him Darwin.

You can see a few more shots of Darwin at my Flickr site by following the links below.

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr