March is My Gotcha Month for Fudge and Vern!!

[Laurie, Fudge, and Vern]

I had gone almost eight months without having a dog.  I would have been the first one to laugh in your face if you had asked me if I wanted to start over with a puppy at age fifty-one.  Of course, I didn’t want to be tied down to a puppy/dog when my husband and I could travel and finally get away without worrying about kids.  Only a real nut would trade a life of leisure for a dog.  So, what happened?  Well, I started looking on the Internet at puppies, just to see what was out there, and we all know what happens when you start looking at puppy faces….you tend to fall in love.  After our last dog, a very challenging rescue dog, my husband wanted me to take a year off from dogs.  He kept saying I was emotionally unstable to make such a big decision, but since he says that to me on a regular basis and I always get the feeling this statement coincides with him asking himself, “how is this going to screw up my life?” I almost always ignore him. 

 

Sure enough, I saw my Fudge, made the decision to get her, and waited for the day I could pick her up almost six hundred miles from home.  Sometimes, people ask me why I do the things I do and I can only say, ‘’it seemed like a good idea at the time.”  Why did I buy my daughter a sectional sofa and two chairs in Pennsylvania, for her first apartment in Indiana?  The only one who benefited from that decision was the U-Haul rental agency when I booked the moving truck to transport those items plus tons more I had impulsively purchased for her. 

At one point as our garage was filling up with various items for our daughter and beginning to look like a TJ Maxx warehouse, my husband said he did ask me, “wouldn’t it be smarter to buy this stuff in Indiana, so we didn’t have to transport it there?” but he said I was in a frenzy at that point holding pillows up to comforters and yelling, “This isn’t teal, it is aqua.  Now, I have to start all over!”  He said he stopped trying to talk sense into me at about the same time I starting waving a new pair of Fiskars scissors around and told him to forget everything he heard about running with sharp scissors and quickly run over to the house and cut me a sample of the fabric on the dining room table. I guess I even told him I would time him.

 

Since most of my family is in Indiana, I felt we would “kill two birds with one stone” and make a mini-vacation of it and then go pick up our new puppy.  My youngest daughter went along for the ride and off we went.  What I didn’t bank on and always forget is that my family runs me ragged when we go home running to this place and that place and I am usually worn out from my “vacation” by the time it is over.  Luckily, I scheduled one day at my daughter’s apartment in West Lafayette the night before our Fudge pick-up and figured we would have one day and night to chill, so we would arrive fresh faced and wide awake when we met our puppy.  What I didn’t count on was the fact that my daughter had a new kitten that seemed to think the two people sleeping on the sectional would enjoy a night of one springy kitten jumping from body to body and running laps around the sectional and the people trying to rest. We would have had a better rest staying at the Bates Motel with Norman and his mother.

(Just call me Aunt Bertha)

Exhausted from lack of sleep, we left in the morning vowing never to return or at least not before picking up a puppy, and drove to the Breeder’s home and on Friday the 13^th of March, picked up the cutest Chocolate Doodle we had ever seen.  

She was a dream in the car and lulled us into a false sense of security by reacting to nothing along the way.  We think the breeder warned her to wait to be ornery until we got home, because she knew we would be in love by that time, and we were. My daughter held her most of the trip and for months, after we got home, Fudge wanted to spend every moment she could with our daughter when Hayley was home.  Every chance I could stop the car; I did, so I could take my turn holding Fudge. Fudge walked into our house like she owned the joint, let the cat know right off the bat that there would be lots of games of chase in her future, and the cat, in turn, let Fudge know that they would not be friends.  There was no turning back.  We had our puppy and have not regretted it for one moment.

 

In fact, it was a little less than a year later that I started dreaming about another dog. Since we were in the middle of planning for our daughter’s wedding, again my husband cautioned me to think with my head and not my heart.  When I told him that is not how I operate, all he said was he thought I might like to give it a try for a change. He was not alone and it seemed like everyone I told I wanted another dog questioned the timing, but luckily, I did what I always do when someone disagrees with me and labeled them stupid in my head and went ahead with my plans.  I fell in love with Vern from a picture and couldn’t wait to get my hands on that little guy. 

This time, I had another well thought out idea.  We gave my daughter a wedding shower in Indiana (600 miles away), got back home on a Tuesday from this exhausting trip, and got back in the car on Friday to drive the almost 400 mile trip to pick up Vern.  One of my friends that went with me to the shower was nice enough to make the trip with me.

 

We made the god awful drive to Rhode Island in bumper-to-bumper traffic in many areas and the long drive was exhausting.  Along the way, we had one dicey moment in New Jersey.  We stopped for gas and while I was trying to find my cash in my purse a man appeared at my window mumbling something.  The bad thing about my self-protection system is that I can't ever find anything in my purse.  I would have to dump the contents and wade through mountains of receipts, mints, and who knows what else, to get to my hand lotion in the hopes I could use it to squirt in the eye of my attacker.  Luckily, while I couldn’t understand a word the guy at my window was saying, my friend could, and calmly explained to me when I whispered in her direction, “does he want us to take our clothes off?” that he was the gas station attendant and wanted to know how much gas I wanted. I asked my friend if I was dreaming and we were back in the 1960’s in Mayberry and Goober Pyle was going to ask me to look under my hood next, but all she said was, “Calm down, Aunt Bea. We are in Jur-zee.”

Who knew they still pumped gas in any state?  When we got to the hotel room, I remember collapsing on the bed at 8 p.m. and telling my friend if we wanted to go out for dinner it had better be soon, or she was going alone.

 

The next morning, the 27^th of March, we arrived at the breeder’s house and I got my first glimpse of our Vern.  He was just perfect and I fell in love at first sight.  When we got him in the car, I just held him for a while like a baby and breathed in that great puppy smell.  My friend said she had never seen me like this before and still talks about me cradling that puppy in the driveway.  I just knew that it was my one chance to savor that moment and there would be no do-overs for my first moments with Vern.  I felt exactly that way about our date with destiny when we met Fudge, too. Our life with two Doodles began on that March day and the rest, as they say, is history!

Our Fudge:

Our Vern:

Fudge and Vern:

[Jane, Rooney & Stuart]

Well a Happy Gotcha month to both Fudge & Vern!!!!  I just love their puppy photos - adorable babies!!!!