Saturday 31 July 2010

Our little girl has amazed me even more today!

Mitzi is our little girl that we got from the Dogs Trust almost 3 weeks ago and she is an amazing puppy (she's 1 year, 1 month and 1 day so is that still a puppy?) and is so much more mature than her age!

Today alone she has done 3 things which make me so proud of her and I feel sorry for those that rejected her just because she was missing half her fur (it's pretty much grown back now - it just needs to thicken up and grow a bit longer)! Those 3 things are: a) she knows not to go out of the front door if she hasn't got her lead on, b) she knows the meaning of "stay" and does it and c) she likes raw carrots!

I don't know about you but that's an amazing 3 things from a rescue puppy who has only been with us for 3 weeks (it'll be 3 weeks on Tuesday, yes I *am* counting)! My previous dog, Whiskey, was 17.5 years old when he went to Rainbow Bridge and he wasn't a rescue puppy and I had him when he was a lot younger too and the only time he would do "stay" was in the garden, with his flexi-lead on and constant eye contact. I kept trying to train him to "stay" and he would remember to do it for a week or so then conveniently forget it!

Mitzi does it with no training so she was either trained by her previous owner or the Dogs Trust to "stay" and it was a wonderful surprise when Steven told me about it this afternoon! Apparently he was taking a bag of rubbish out to the bin and had the front door wide open when our little girl appeared. Steven told her to "stay" and she didn't move at all until the door was closed and Steven praised her!

So, with pretty much no training from either Steven or I, our little girl is already house trained, knows "sit", "no", "stay", "come", "good girl", "say please" and "say thank you" (she learnt those last 2 after I said them to her 3 times on 3 different days but that is literally the only training she's had from us).

With the raw carrots, Steven saw a programme on TV a few days ago that said to give dogs raw carrots as a healthy treat so he ordered a bag of carrots with the shopping, knowing that if our little girl didn't like them then I do so they wouldn't be wasted.

When he'd put the shopping away, Steven opened the bag of carrots, broke one in half and offered half to Mitzi. She gladly took it from him and started chomping away on it! Steven peeled the other half and gave it to me... by the time I was half way down my half, Mitzi had finished her half and was looking up at me with her gorgeous pleading eyes wanting the other half! lol

I want to publicly say thank you to those people who rejected Mitzi just based on her fur problem - we have got a wonderful little girl living with us now and you don't! So there!

We are lucky to have Mitzi! She's an incredible little girl who is ours for the next decade!

Thursday 22 July 2010

For those that don't know...

If you have read my domain, you will know that I'm a huge Take That fan and I'm not sure how I feel about Robbie re-joining the group! He said a lot of nasty things when he left the group but if Jason, Gary, Howard and Mark can forgive him and let him back into the group then I don't have any reason to keep disliking him either!

Should I forgive him for hurting Take That and several thousand fans 15 years ago or should I realise that he's hopefully grown up since being a solo artist?

I really don't know right now!

Sunday 11 July 2010

Some good news before I forget again!

If you are a member of any of the same groups and/or communities as me then this won't be new news but we were officially accepted to rehome Mitzi from Evesham Dogs Trust yesterday afternoon! Big yay!

I've been nagging Steven since January about re-homing a dog from them and last Saturday (not yesterday, the Saturday before that - 8 days ago) he surprised me by suggesting going over there as long as we didn't bring a dog back with us which I happily agreed to.

When we arrived we told them that I had filled in the rehoming form online back in January so they found the form on the computer, printed it out and told us to take it down to the kennels... oh boy were my legs hurting by the time we got down there! lol

The bods at the kennels took the printout off us and gave us another form to fill in letting them know the names of the dogs we were interested in. After an hour or so of walking around the kennels looking at all of the dogs we came up with a list of 3 that we wanted to know more about.

We took the form back to the reception of the kennels (the bit where we handed in the re-homing form) and were told that 2 of the 3 dogs were 'booked' and the third was now on a walk with someone who had the same idea as us but got there before us!

After waiting for the dog to come back for 45 minutes with no sign of them coming back any time soon we decided to go home and try again on a different day. We told the woman behind the counter that and left. I'd met the dogs and seen how they were homed and fallen in love with several of them and we knew where to go now and both Steven and I had fallen in love with the dogs they homed so I knew we'd be back.

The centre is huge though and we quickly got lost as we were trying to find our way back to the car. That's when things went better than I was expecting because someone came after us and told us that there was a wonderful West Highland Terrier looking for a new home. We'd both seen her on our way around and hadn't put her down on the form because I was worried she would be too small for me to bend over and put her lead on (I'm not very steady on my feet and I was worried that bending down would unbalance me so much that I would fall flat on my face and not be able to get back up alone) so we hadn't put her down on the form.

Steven and I looked at each other and I think I must have fluttered my eyes at him or something because we went back to reception to meet her and I fell in love with her then and there!

I held onto the desk and bent down enough to let her sniff my outstretched hand and her tail started wagging... that sold me more than anything - she had literally only just met me but she was already pleased to see me!

So, after she let me and Steven stroke her for a couple of minutes we went for a short walk so that we could both get to know her on the lead too... she pulled a bit but I reckon that was just because she was excited to be out of the kennel! As she is so small the pulling didn't unbalance me like I thought it would - I've never been so glad to be wrong!

We found out that her name is Mitzi and we both went back to reception to say we wanted to take her home. We were told that we would need to go to a pre-adoption talk (we went to that yesterday) then we could take her home the next day (today).

It's my dad's funeral tomorrow though so we didn't think it would be fair on her to leave her on her own so soon after bringing her home so we are going to collect her on Tuesday instead!

Steven is going to take his mobile with him so that we can take a photo of the centre, Mitzi and hopefully the bods who have been looking after her... keep an eye on my domain as that's where all the photos (and hopefully videos if I can work out how to put them on YouTube) will be!

If you live in the UK and are thinking of getting a dog then I definitely recommend going to your nearest Dogs Trust re-homing centre and getting your dog from there! If you don't want to re-home a dog then maybe sponsor one (or more) of the dogs on the site instead? It's only £1 per week per dog which is £4 a month! The Dogs Trust URL is dogstrust.org.uk

I seem to have written a book already so I'm going to shut up now and give you a bit of peace and quiet!