What did we just do???

I had heard it too many times. A boy needs a dog! A boy deserves a dog! And we have two boys…so it was pretty much a given that this should automatically happen. Right? Nope! These two boys have some pretty stubborn parents who don’t want dog hair or dog poop or potty training problems to deal with. I had just gotten to the point where I could control the amount of toys being brought into the living room! Why? WHY on earth would we even think about a dog??!!! Well simple…we thought it was time they got their dog.

So it began. The search for a dog. The parents who weren’t doing the dog thing…turned into the parents searching the internet day and night to find a dog. This was not a quick process. Those of you who know my husband know that he doesn’t do anything on a spur of the moment. And truth be told…he got cold feet at times and so did I. This started in June. Yes June. We were patient and careful. We had a couple potential leads that never went anywhere positive. I was beginning to get frustrated and I knew that no matter what….we would not settle. Was I desperate at times??? Yes. But then I realized that there were no real time constraints and that we would find a dog to love.

And so it happened. Last Saturday night I was searching all of my fourteen websites that I would check daily for new listings, and I found the add. We called up the people, went to see the dogs. We picked out the one that when I held him, he just cuddled up and rested. We asked the couple if we could come back the following weekend and pick him up and they really couldn’t have been nicer and said of course. So, we had our puppy.

WHAT DID WE JUST DO? That exact sentence was going through my mind a hundred times on our way home from picking out the dog. I had an upset stomach the whole way home. I just kept thinking…THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. We’re not ready. We don’t have anything. We don’t know the first thing about potty training a puppy. What are we going to tell the boys??? Then I would go through a calm period and remind myself that I am in charge of 36 ten and eleven year olds for six hours on a daily basis…I can handle a puppy for crying out loud. And then, without fail, panic ensued again.

We told the boys that afternoon. They were beyond excited. Their reaction was everything we expected it to be and more. Matthew must have asked us a thousand questions. Ryan reacted like a typical three year old…he was excited for 29 seconds and then asked us who we were rooting for in his hockey game…The Sharks or The Red Wings.??

Later on in the week I had asked Matthew if he would have preferred that we waited longer to tell him because then he wouldn’t have had to wait so long. He was honest and said yes. He said the week seemed to go by so slow and he was just so excited. I know this for several reasons. The first, his teacher Mrs. Hennecke, was now counting down the days until the dog came. Every time I saw her, she too, like Matthew, told me how many days until D-Day. Second, I would have to sit and listen to a series of scenarios that Matthew would throw at me as “what-ifs”. My favorite was this one: Mom, what would happen if my backpack was on the floor and it was unzipped and the dog crawled inside and I didn’t know it was in there and I zipped up my backpack and took the dog to school not knowing he was in there? What would happen, Mom? Would I get in trouble? After I assured him that it would NEVER happen, he still gave me more “what-if” scenarios of the dog “accidentally” ending up at school. I told him I will be checking his backpack daily.

That night as went to dinner we were playing the name game. I will spare you all of the funny, unfortunate, ridiculous names that were brought to the table. Rich and I decided that we would have veto power toward any name that we thought other people would immediately say “So you let the kids pick the name?” About half way to the restaurant Matthew says, “How about Teddy? His first name can be Teddy…because he looks like a teddy bear. His middle name can be Bear because that is the second part of teddy bear. And his last name will be Marini. So his name would be Teddy Bear Marini.” I looked at Rich and said out of the corner of my mouth…"That’s actually not that bad." And so it was decided, we would name him Teddy Bear Marini. Aka…Teddy.

Meet the newest Marini!