It was a few nights before Christmas… when a bunch of nice people with a help of one very special one, Kristen, decided to grant our family’s Christmas Wish of having a dog for Christmas.
We had been in contact of several close by shelters we found from PetSmart Adoptions
The shelter we visited actually had three different dogs that would have fit our family well.
A Labrador-Shepherd mix, one of the prettiest dogs I’ve seen (I love Labs) – but we took her out for a walk, and spent some time with her, and since was was only around six months old, with no training whatsoever, we decided that considering her size and lack of training she might be just too much for our family. Kids might get hurt and training her from her bad habits would to take a lot of effort (she was pulling so much on leash, and no way kids could have walked him for months, and of course, there was also the issue of potty training.. ).
The second option was a Jack Russel Terrier – Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Mix, cute and happy, but also not house trained. Kids loved walking her, and she was fairly well behaved, until she saw other dogs to walk by, then started to barking… She was really cute, and my girls adored her, but I didn’t really have the “connection” to her. You just have to feel that the dog is “the one”, you know.
And… the lucky winner, whom we all fell in love with is our new family member Austin. An unknown age beagle from Kentucky. He had just arrived to New York about a week ago, he was rescued from a kill shelter (a shelter we they put dogs to sleep, if they are not adopted after a certain amount of time). He was dirty, little shy at first, but most of the time just a happy little sweetheart. Austin is somewhere between a year and a two year old boy, he still has some puppyish characters, but he also is very calm and has been very adaptive. In general we were a little bit vary of getting anything else but a puppy – you just never know what the rescue dogs have gone through and what kind of issues they might have- but Austin just is the gentlest little friend, and I am hoping our gut feeling about him is the right one. We also did a lot of research on his breed and beagle are known to get along well with children, and one of their characteristics is being friendly.
Austin looks mostly like a Beagle, but since he is a rescue dog, we can not be sure of his breed, and his body is fairly long, in fact he has already gained a few loving family nick names like “sausage” and “a nose with a tail” (he is a sniffer), so who knows, he might even have a little bit of Dachshund in him. Either way, we love him.
Last night he was just smiling (dog owners know, dogs smile too) and he slept on the floor right next to us when we watched a family movie. He feels really comfortable here, and I think he already loves us too. In fact the only thing we have hard time training him now is not to jump up to our bed… he seems to love us so much that he wouldn’t have minded at all sleeping between me and my husband last night. We just gave a little blanket for him for his “bed” for now before we have time to visit the closest PetSmart and buy his own bed. He ended up giving up after jumping to our bed around 15 times last night and finally fell asleep in his own spot.
Stay tuned for our family’s adventure with Austin, and thank you so much all of my friends who made this possible.
