The Small Family     

Okay, before anything else, a big happy birthday to Grandma Diane, who turned 110 today! Kidding, of course…she’s still in her sixties. But today was indeed her birthday, so happy birthday! We celebrated by going to our favorite Turkish restaurant for dinner. Chris offered to take over Theo duty for a few hours so we could go to a movie or something, but my Mom insisted all she wanted to do was have dinner at the Turkish restaurant…and so we did!

Her present from us was a book called The Buffalo Architectural Watercolors. We saw it in the gift shop at the Botanical Garden when we were there for Katy’s wedding, but we had no room in our suitcases for it. So we ordered it from Amazon, and it arrived shortly after we got home. Easy! I was very happy to have found it, as my Mom loves books about Buffalo. Even though she hasn’t lived there in almost 50 years, it will always be her home, and she loves to read about its history and such.

Much of our week was spent unpacking and getting back to normal life after our excellent vacation. (If you haven’t already noticed, there are FIVE new blog entries covering our two weeks of vacation! I had far too many pictures to fit in one or two posts, so I split it into five.) However, we do have some big news! For some months we’ve been casually looking to adopt a second dog. We weren’t in a rush--just figured when the time was right and we found the right dog, we’d get a second one. When Bitsy passed away early last year, we figured we’d get another dog at some point--but not right away. We wanted Theo to be old enough to be gentle with the dogs, and we were in no real rush. But now, we found Miss Zoe and adopted her on Friday night!

I’ve been monitoring a few adoption sites and want-ad sites for months, and we’ve had a few near misses with dogs. And I thought this would be the case with Zoe as well, but everything turned out to fall into place. The owners brought her over to meet us on Friday night, and although they had 13 other possible homes for her (adoptable pugs in good health go FAST!), they said we were the nicest of the people they talked to, and they thought our house/yard/neighborhood would be perfect for Zoe. (Several of the other people lived in apartments…so no yard for Zoe to go out and play in.) We fell in love with Zoe pretty much on sight, so when they offered her to us, we took her!

So a few stats: Zoe will be two years old in January. I’m not sure what day, so we’ve just given her my birthday--January 8th! She’s very petite compared to Luna. She has her first vet appt with our vet on Tuesday, where she’ll be weighed, but I’d guess her at about 14 pounds, compared to Luna’s 20 pounds. (16 to 18 is about average for a pug.) She also hasn’t been spayed, and she’s actually a very “good” specimen of a pug--beautiful coloring and the coveted “double-curl” tail that breeders want. So my guess is that her owners bought her to breed, then couldn’t breed her for whatever reason and decided to give her up. They said they just had too many pets, and with six kids, they just didn’t have time for her. But the wife specifically suggested that I not consider breeding her, and that plus the fact that she’s not spayed tells me that there’s probably something they’re not sharing. She looks as if she may have had a litter of puppies, and I have a feeling they may have bred her, but it didn’t go well. She’s very tiny, so maybe she wasn’t big enough to easily deliver puppies. I plan to ask our vet on Tuesday whether she’s been bred before. Not to be too graphic, but both my Mom and I think her nipples look like those of a mama who has had puppies.

She took to Luna right away, and vice versa--after a few minutes of cautiously checking each other out, they ran like crazy around the house in a wonderful game of chase. In the past two days, they have mostly done very well together, although there is some of the posturing to see who will be “alpha dog” that one expects when a new dog enters the household. Zoe’s quite sure she wants to be the alpha, but Luna isn’t quite sure she wants to give up the position. (I’m sort of rooting for Luna--she was here first, so I figure she deserves it!)

So far, Zoe is very sweet with Theo (and hopefully that will continue to be the case--if it doesn’t, we’ll obviously have to rehome her). He already grabbed a toy right out of her mouth before I could stop him, and she didn’t even flinch--just gave it right up to him. We met the four-year-old daughter of the people giving Zoe up, so I think Zoe’s pretty used to being around small children. At one point Theo tripped over a toy and fell over, and she ran up and kissed him, which made him laugh like crazy. So I think they’ll be good friends.

So that’s our new addition! I think we’re going to be very happy with her. You all know that I’m the huge dog person in our house, but Chris has grown to love Luna (who wouldn’t? She’s awesome!), and he is quite taken by Zoe already. She follows him around, and I think he gets a kick out of it. :-)

Our other fun on Friday was a date night to Crush 29, a local restaurant and wine bar. My Mom had gotten us a gift certificate “so [she] could babysit Theo.” This cracked me up--I informed her that she doesn’t have to buy us gift certificates to babysit Theo--she can babysit him for free anytime she wants! After all, we should be paying her! And we do…usually in Starbucks mochas or lunch. But anyway…she bought us a gift certificate, and so we used it. However, our friend Briagha also wanted to babysit, so we gave her the pleasure (ha!) for this particular date, and we’ll catch up with my Mom’s offer for perhaps a movie date soon, or something along those lines.

Because we had our lovely gift certificate, we really lived it up! I had a Bloody Mary and Chris had a mojito to start. We split an appetizer of crab rangoons, and then we shared two entrees: hangar steak with mushrooms, asparagus, and mashed potatoes and chicken with prosciutto, havarti cheese, polenta, and green beans. All fantastic! For dessert, I got banana cream pie and Chris had strawberry shortcake. Yum! My Aunt Sally is now rolling her eyes and saying, “Pale desserts, both of them!” She regards all non-chocolate desserts as “pale” and not nearly as exciting as chocolate. And while I normally agree, I have to say that this was by far the best banana cream pie I’ve ever had! The reason I opted for it over chocolate was that it had peanut butter crème anglaise served with it, and I truly love peanut butter on anything and everything. And wow…fantastic! A very successful date night indeed¾a delicious supper AND a new pug!

My Mom, Theo, and I also attended a pug meetup with Luna on Saturday. (We left Zoe home, as we thought she might be overwhelmed given that she’s had so many changes this weekend.) So you’ll see a few pictures this week from there.

That’s about all the news from this corner of the world this week. More next week, no doubt, as we’re likely headed to San Jose to visit Chris’s family.