For a little over a year now, we’ve talked about getting a dog. Lance grew up with dogs and cats, and though he loves both, the kid in him loves the play factor dogs naturally possess. I grew up with only cats*. I always wanted dogs–because isn’t that what kids are supposed to do??–but my parents never let us have them.
*There’s more to this, but that’s another story and a very unpleasant one, too.**
**Where are the Marx Brothers fans?*
*No? Just me?
Even during my childhood, despite wanting a dog, I certainly was not a dog person. I’m the same with dogs as I am with babies. While other women flock to them with baby talk gushing from their lips, I’m aware of their presence, but never felt the need to shower them with adoration.
And now, I am one of them.
The dog people, that is.*
*Apologies to my MIL if I confused you into thinking a baby is next on the horizon.
I always imagined getting a smaller dog, like a Pomeranian. Back in January, I found Lila, the cutest chihuahua/dachshund mix ever. She had the biggest ears and was adorably perfect.
Which naturally meant someone scooped her up and adopted her before we could.
The search ended there. Then a month ago our good friends, Jill and Andrew, decided to adopt a dog. After two interactions where Lance played with him nonstop, he said the words I, for some reason, hadn’t expected, “I think I want a dog.”
It wasn’t the same as when we’d found Lila back in January. She came about from a casual, let’s-look-for-a-dog kind of mood. This had a this-is-going-to-happen firmness to it.
We hadn’t noticed, but we’d already begun figuring out just what kind of dog we wanted. During a weekend getaway to Pittsburgh*, we ended up walking behind this perfectly bulky bulldog who put me in mind of Stitch from Lilo and Stitch.** I decided then and there that this was the dog of my dreams. I wanted a bulldog and I wanted to name him Stitch. If he could reach his nose with his tongue, and I mean really, really get in there, all the better. To my surprise, Lance felt exactly the same. He loved the idea of a bulldog.
*More on that later.
**Confession time. We watched this movie on our way to Hawaii. I regret nothing.
Does his name made sense now?
Fast forward to Hubby’s declaration of wanting a dog, and what do I do? Immediately begin the search for bulldogs on Petfinder. Despite the fact that it was through Petfinder we found and lost Lila, this was less of a needle in a haystack kind of way* to search for a dog so specific.
*We’d gone to various shelters during the Lila time period because another unspoken stance of our wanting to get a dog was that it would come from a shelter.
Stitch loves food as much as I do. We are made for each other.
Stitch, then called ‘Blue’*, was the only dog my search yielded. He was the perfect match of the dog we were picturing. However, it was quite the whirlwind of events in order to actually make him ours. The shelter we went through was based out of a PetSmart location, which meant he could only be seen during the preplanned viewing hours. This also meant that due to his breed mixture many, many, many people wanted to see him.
I don’t always stand by the ‘it was meant to be’ way of thinking, but with Stitch, I’m pretty sure it was meant to be. Although a stack of adoption applications were not only ahead of ours, but already in the decision making phase when we arrived, we were the lucky ones who went home with him that day.
Leave a Reply