Blogging Buddies: Emmett and us

As you may know if you are a long time reader, I have been OBSESSED with the idea of getting a Bulldog puppy for well over a year now. This past spring, M and I took a lot of walks, and on one walk I commented on how badly I wished we had a little Bulldog accompanying us on our walks. That ache didn't go away, and once we got home I went to the website of the breeder we had chosen to torture myself by looking at the dogs. That's when I saw that they were planning to breed the male that we wanted to the female that we wanted. I emailed the breeder to see when they were planning for the litter and we were told that the litter would be born in July, and that there were no deposits so we could have first pick if we put down a deposit. I talked it over with M, and we decided we could put a deposit down and if we decided we weren't ready, we could hold off for another litter.

I was so excited, all spring and summer I couldn't wait for word that the pups were born. Then the due date passed, no word. A few days later no word. About a week after the due date I signed in to Facebook to see that the breeder had posted "Sad news, there are no puppies, it was a false pregnancy." I went from shocked to angry very quickly. If you are breeding dogs, you have your pregnant dogs to the vet several times to make sure everything is ok, they should have known about this weeks prior, and they should have emailed deposit holders instead of just randomly posting on Facebook. We had the option of rolling our deposit to their next available litter. But we had wanted a puppy from those dogs specifically. And after seeing this breeders less than professional actions, we decided to pull our deposit. The 45 day claim period had expired on PayPal, and the breeder wouldn't willingly refund our money at first. So I had to file all kinds of claims and call PayPal and my bank. It was a nightmare. Finally after several weeks, we were able to get our deposit back. We thought that this was all for the better. We were buying our house, and moving with a new puppy would have been really difficult.

So for a while, my focus moved from puppies to getting our house set up and fixed. Once most of that action died down, I got the fever worse than ever. I was scouring craigslist and petfinder for older bulldogs that needed adoption, but nothing seemed to work out. I started to give up on my bulldog dream and considered getting a Pit, like M wanted. Then one night while laying in bed I had the idea to check the Want Ad Digest on my phone to see if there were any local listings for Pit puppies because I didn't want to wait til spring. After searching "puppies," the first ad that popped up had the headline "Bulldog / Pug Pups" and they would be ready to go the following weekend. I felt like it was fate. I didn't say anything to M right away, but I knew that our puppy was in that litter. The next day I sent him a picture text of one of the pups and his response was "k." So I called the number and told the guy we would be there on Sunday to pick up a pup. At first M was hesitant about it all, thought that we were jumping the gun and should maybe hold out for a bulldog like I really wanted. But I told him that this was it, our dog was in that litter.

We drove out 2 hours that weekend to pick our puppy. They had 1 male and 2 females left out of a litter of 7. We considered taking one of the females, and had a really tough time deciding, but ultimately went with the male. And then it took us about 2 weeks before we finally settled on his name: Emmett.

I have to say that getting an 8 week old puppy is a lot more work than I had anticipated. I had been reading a really great book in preparation called "The Art of Raising a Puppy," and thought I had everything totally down. When I adopted my last dog, Milo, he was 6 months old, crate trained, and sleeping through the night. Emmett was doing none of these things. I would get up 2-3 times a night to take him out and I was a sleep starved zombie. I also didn't realize how all consuming a young puppy would be, that I wouldn't get anything done because he needed to be constantly monitored. Now, at 14 weeks, he is just starting to leave the stage where I have to watch him every second. He can be trusted for short times to play around the house, he's mostly housebroken, save for a few accidents, and has been sleeping though the night for about 4 weeks now. I'm really loving this new stage of puppyhood!

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