Meet Henley!

Getting dried off after her bath this week.

So, like I mentioned in the last post, part of the reason it's been crazytown around here is because we got a dog. Yup, remember this post? Didn't take long, did it? ;)

Anyway, her name is Henley and she's a one-ish year old puggle (pug/beagle mix). We adopted her from the animal shelter at the end of March. She has a sad/angry looking face, is medium sized (27 lbs), is suuuuuuper snuggly, was kind of potty trained, and is still very much a puppy. It's been fun and uh... interesting.

It happened kind of fast. Reese had been going on and on about how she wanted a dog. We kept telling her maybe someday. Well, the persistent little bugger finally got to her daddy enough that he agreed to go to the animal shelter on his next day off just to see what there was.

So we went to two different ones and they were all big dogs or older dogs - not quite what we were looking for. So we came home and looked online and found pictures of Henley and her brother at a neighboring shelter.  The next day I called and took the kids with me to check her out. She was calm, adorable, the perfect size, and was really good with the kids. I was sold. The only small problem was that she had a generalized case of demodectic mange (which are tiny skin mites that are on every dog, but when they're immune system is compromised the mites go crazy and the dog gets super itchy and rash-like.) Not good. Treatable, but not good. Nevertheless, without Wade even seeing her, he told me to go ahead and pay the $70 to ensure no one else would get her. We had to wait another week to go pick her up, but before we knew it, we had a dog!

Look at that face! She's like, "Can I  please come out now?"

We've had her for a month now and we're still working out the kinks. She's still learning not to pee in our bedroom, not to jump on the kids, not to dig up my plants, not to chew on toys & shoes, and all that other fun (!!) puppy stuff. We're still working on commands like sit, stay, and come. I think she likes us, I mean, we've got to be better than the last place she came from. Wade loves her, the kids love her, and I'm..... learning to love her. It's a totally different feeling than what I thought it would be. To be honest, it's been hard.

You can kind of see in this picture some of her spots from the mange. When we got her, it was raw and bleeding from where she had scratched it so much. She's on antibiotics, which means two pills a day, an liquid oral medicine once a day, and a 20 minute bath with special shampoo once a week. It's gotten soo much better and she hardly itches at all now. It's definitely cost us a little money, but we really wanted to give her a shot at a better life. Her hair is growing back and she's DEFINITELY more energetic than when we first got her.

I love this picture. It's what they look like every night before bedtime. Oh, Henley. The newest member of our family. The beginning has been tough, but I'm hoping one of my favorite sayings holds true:

"Nobody ever said it'd be easy, 

they just promised it'd be worth it."