Doing the right thing

So it's past midnight, and I can't sleep. I've been thinking about Cody & Tessa all night.

For those of you who don't know, David and I got German Shorthair Pointer puppies 1.5 years ago—male & female, from the same litter.

David had always wanted to try bird dog hunting. I think he had visions of taking the dogs out and working them in the corn fields around our house, scaring up pheasants and whatnot. He had come across pointers in his life and thought they would make good family pets too.

I, on the other hand, just have a general fondness for dogs (okay, not as much as I do for cats... who are just SO much easier than dogs), and I was happy to add animals to our household who could double as family protectors. If you saw our house in the middle of nowhere—literally in the woods, in the country, where it's really, really quiet—you'd feel that way too.

So when we knew we were buying a house with 4.5 acres (at the time we lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Westerville), we dove in and got not one, but two rambunctious pointers from a country breeder in Southern Ohio.



Looking back, our decision to get two dogs is what did us in. Our intentions were good. We knew we would be away from home for long periods of time during the day, and we wanted our puppies to have playmates other than the cats. What we should have considered was the sheer amount of energy TWO pointers equates to. That we completely underestimated.

Their energy, however, was overshadowed entirely in those early months by how absolutely adorable they were. And they were eager students—promptly mastering sit & lay down, and generally staying off the furniture (at least when they weren't rearranging it via wrestling).



I don't think we realized until a few months ago that these dogs may not grow old with us...

When I got pregnant last September ('06), I remember thinking that we had a lot of work to do with them before the baby was born. We were never once worried about them intentionlly harming our future baby. Both dogs never showed an ounce of harmful aggression. Instead, we spent a lot of time trying to picture two very rowdy dogs—dogs who have so much fun romping & wrestling, they rarely stop to see who they're mowing over in the process, and also doggies who believe ANYTHING on the floor or a table less than 8 feet high is fair game—could coexist in a room with a tiny, helpless infant.

I'm sure every dog owner ponders that picture for a least a short moment... but I think of my friends, Shauna & Art, who have a tiny weiner dog, and I'm sure they can't imagine a baby not getting along splendidly with their little Dozer Von Puppypants (or vice versa).

I think as David and I watched my belly swell, we hoped for the best, and wished desperately that we had more time to work with the dogs before our bundle of joy arrived.

But between badly needed updates to our house, getting the nursery ready, David working an insane 60+ hours/week at work, we realized too late that our puppies weren't ready to be poster doggies for obedience school. Were they still adorable? Of course. Were they obedient? Not so much.



And then all of the sudden, Noah arrived. And our world was forever changed.

For me, it was an immediate, primal feeling... all I wanted was to keep our tiny baby safe. Mind you, I knew very well that our dogs weren't dangerous, but I knew they were clumsy & giddy and altogether too much for Noah. And I also knew that I would do anything to make sure they didn't ram into him, eat packs of his diapers and chew up his bottles.

For a while, that usually fuzzy gray line of pet vs. family member became very black & white to me (even when it came to my prized kitties!), and I didn't care if we had to inconvenience our animals for the sake of our son.

I'm sure David didn't feel things quite as strongly as me—after all, he didn't have millions of hormones gallavanting through his body at all moments of the day—but he felt something awfully similar. Because not even a week after Noah was born, the doggies had a brand-new, deluxe kennel outside where they could run & romp & exahust themselves...far away from our baby boy. Our indoor puppies had just become rugged, outdoor dogs.



At first, it seemed like we could make the outdoor daytime kennel/indoor overnight crate system work. David would come home from work in the summer and run the dogs around the yard with the quad. Or while he did yard work, he'd let the dogs out to play with him.



But as fall & winter set in, we realized that there were fewer hours in the day for playtime with the dogs. Noah was spending more time awake and mobile, our work loads never lightened, our weekends filled up with traveling (which, by the way, could no longer include the dogs with the sheer mountain of baby stuff required for traveling!), and it all became too much.

And slowly, we began to realize that our intentions to have lifetime family pets were not being met. And we knew that Cody & Tessa deserved better.

Fast forward three months, and we arrive at today—a day I thought would be a little hard, but not tough, given that I'd spent so little time with Cody & Tessa in the last seven months. But I was wrong.

Today, a very nice family that lives on a 20-acre farm came to "interview" Cody & Tessa. They answered an ad we placed on Craigslist to find a new home for our dogs. The dad in this family is an avid hunter. He has a coon hound already, and has always wanted bird dogs. They brought along their 2-year-old son, Tough (!), who was chasing Cody & Tess around the yard after 30 minutes of uncertainty.

Cody & Tessa were wonderful today. They were immediately loving to everyone in the family, and they zipped about and played their parts perfectly. So perfectly that our puppies went home with a new family today.

Watching David load them into someone else's truck today from our front window made me cry like a baby. It caught me completely offguard. I could see that David was heartbroken. These were his dogs, after all, and he truly didn't want to give them up.

We spent a long time today feeling miserable about the situation... just hoping that this family is truly as good as they sound... hoping that Tessa & Cody are happy & exercised and loved... and hoping—more than anything—that we didn't make a mistake (and I, for one, felt a little bit like a failure as I watched that truck pull away).

I do think we did the right thing, even though it hurts a great deal right now. I hope, too, that we have learned our lesson, and that when we get another dog years from now, that we are better prepared and more honest about what we can handle as pet owners.

I know Cody & Tessa are going to make wonderful pets for this new family, but for now, though, I just miss them and their familiar sleep noises. Wherever they are, I hope they are cuddled up together, sound asleep, all worn out from their latest adventure.