Her name is Foxy...

and she's the newest member of our family! I've wanted a dog for at least 15 years and finally here she is. When we lived in apartments in San Francisco our landlords were never OK with dogs. Then when we moved across the Bay and purchased our own home, our cat was a senior citizen and it didn't seem fair to him to try to introduce a dog into his sedate life. Sadly our cat died in April and we grieved the loss of him. He was 18 years old and had been a wonderful companion for us. Although we knew that we would eventually get a dog we took our time allowing ourselves to miss our kitty. After eight months, right before the holidays I started looking online at the local Humane's Society and SPCA as well as other rescues. I spotted Foxy on the East Bay SPCA's website right away and really liked her. I spent a few days fantasizing about her and the day I was ready to go meet her, she was adopted by another family. Although I was disappointed, I let it go relatively quickly knowing that the right dog would come into our lives and I assumed that it wasn't Foxy. So we kept looking online and visited a few shelters never finding the right dog for us. We had already planned to go look at some other dogs at the East Bay SPCA yesterday. Then the night before I checked the website to see if there were any new arrivals and there she was! So we met her and found out that she had been "surrendered" by the previous adoptive family because she played rough with their 6 year old daughter and they didn't have the time to train her to learn to play gently with kids. We were a bit concerned about this because our 7 year old niece is a big part of our lives. We see her almost every weekend and since she cannot have a dog where she lives, we decided to share ours with her. After talking with the trainers and spending some time with Foxy we felt that we would be able to work with her so that she would be a good member of our family. The next step was to introduce her to our niece today at the SPCA. They met and hit it off really well. So we adopted her! I'm not sure who was more excited, me or my niece. She had a good ride home in the car - no mistakes or car sickness. Since she was doing so good we went straight to the pet supply shop with her and got all the stuff - crate, food, toys, leash, treats, etc. That visit was pretty stimulating for her. Lots of smells and other dogs to get excited over. She is a Great Dane/Lab mix and is just over a year old which makes her an adolescent and she weighs 80 lbs. Needless to say we plan to put a lot of time into training her because we want and need her to be well behaved. We don't like dogs who are out of control anyway but with her size it would be really irresponsible to let her misbehave. She's been on 2 walks with us today and did really well with some corrective instruction from us. We also introduced her to her crate which she went into fine but didn't like staying there with us out of the room. She has an interesting whine, almost a yodel, which she used to try to get us to let her out but after 10 minutes she accepted her situation and calmed down. We'll see how she does tonight since that's where she'll sleep. She already tried to get on the bed and we definitely don't want an 80 lb. adolescent dog sleeping with us. Right now she is chillin' in the living room while I work on this post and my husband watches football. She's already fitting into our routine. We are so happy and are looking forward to having a wonderful life with her.