Last week I brought a new member into my home, Cortado Covfefe Cohen, or Coco for short. She’s a wonderful lab and duck tolling retriever mix. While the first day was amazing and she is great, I get significantly less sleep these days. People say it’s like having a newborn, and technically she is a young child, but I didn’t get any onramp. Went pretty much from the adoption stage right into getting up all time and having my hand chewed on at every turn. Luckily, I have the financial stability to procure chew toys and that is my first stop this morning!
Seriously, while I lament the lack of sleep she really is an amazing puppy. She is kind to and friendly to strangers (we take a daily trip to the coffee shop where she needs to stay on her towel (she is not fully vaccinated yet) and greets everyone with a lick. She will then move over to biting. Hopefully, if I give her more chew toys she will learn what to chew.
Getting a puppy was not something I took lightly. I have been thinking about getting a dog forever. One of my roommates in CA had g/f with a dog that would spend time over our house. That was an indication of how much I wanted a dog. Once I came back to the east coast, I wanted a dog to keep me company and help with the space. When I started dating my girlfriend, even she suggested I get a dog because her cat was never going to love me the way that I loved the cat. This has been a long time coming.
Lastly, just want to mention Save-A-Lab Rescue. Their application process is a little more involved than most and the process to get approved is slow, but they are a great organization and helped me land a pretty perfect puppy. They rescue labs and lab mixes from the southern kill shelters and transport them to the northeast where they can be adopted. As someone who has seen dogs elsewhere who I wish I could have adopted but these other agencies wouldn’t allow me to adopt out of state, it is really great to have found an organization that is taking labs from an area where they are in excess to an area where they are in demand. E$veryone I met was really kind and in the end, the process to adoption, once approved, was very fast!
So, I’m sure there will be more tales of Coco coming up, but for now, we are both just adjusting to each other’s personalities and finding a way to live together. I’m so excited to have this bundle of joy in my life.