puppy pals

Happy New Year! Our house has had a couple of new additions in December. Of the canine variety as you probably figured out from the title. We have been reading books on adopting a dog off and on for years, and found one on Petfinder that seemed like a nice fit for our family. His name is Sherlock and he is a rescue dog from Alabama. We e-mailed our application and shortly thereafter he was scheduled to be shipped up to New England. He is a pointer shepherd mix. Sherlock is 4 months old and is already a big boy at 32 lbs.

Sherlock on his new bed enjoying a rawhide "candy cane"

One of our friends posted on Facebook about a litter of puppies needing a home, sort of simultaneously as we were submitting our application for Sherlock. We thought about this over a weekend and decided that it sort of made sense to go for it and adopt the little beagle needing a home as if we did get two dogs they would grow up together. So Lucy the pocket beagle joined our little family and the boys adore her. Lucy is 8 lbs and will likely not get bigger than our cat. She is a cute little butterball.

the boys with Lucy

The dogs are quite a pair, we think Sherlock thinks he is a pocket beagle at the way they sometimes wrestle.. play.. fight? They both love going outside for walks. We have taken them in our yard/woods, and on the local rail trail which they had the best time on. We are crate training and Lucy has actually been doing really well, but Sherlock hates his crate so we are trying to make it more appealing.

Since getting the dogs it has been a big adjustment for our schedule, since homeschoolers in general get to sleep in a bit more if they so choose (we did), but it is probably a good thing.

Ludwig playing with a catnip fish from Santa

Oh, and the cat? He is doing surprisingly well with the pups. He has not really hissed, and he knows that he is the real Alpha (ha), his territory is still his, such as the basement and bedrooms. Ludwig has been losing some weight recently, before the dogs arrived, and this is his tenth year with us. We got him as a kitten the year we were married. We changed up his food in hopes he will gain some weight again and hope to have a few more years with our baby Boo, but we will of course monitor his progress and if he gets sick we will cross that bridge when we come to it.