Puppy Love

We have a puppy!

We picked Juno up at the breeder’s home a week ago (Morning Dove Aussies). Juno shared the house with five other dogs (including her dad and one of her litter mates) and a couple of kids, so she’d been very well socialized with people, animals and different environments. She’s been a wonderful pup so far – calm, confident, affectionate and playful. She’s still a puppy though, so it’s a bit like having a toddler in the house again, with all the joys, challenges and sleep deprivation that go along with that.

Juno went through a lot of changes in her first week as we planned our trip before we knew we were getting a puppy. The first few days were at Ray’s mom’s place where Juno met many neighbours and relatives (we got used to the “oh yeah, hi, how are you guys doing?” after Juno had been greeted – no competing with puppy cuteness).

We broke up the drive back to Ottawa with a stop to visit friends in Cobourg, where Juno discovered sand and tried to catch waves on the beach. After giving Juno a chance to burn off some energy, we drove on to an AirBnB in Prince Edward County and spent a couple of days there with my sister. Juno would repeatedly follow Karen into her room then trot back out proudly carrying a new toy. She has at least a dozen toys now, none of which we purchased ourselves.

Everyone who meets Juno thinks she’s a sweetie, but I expect people are questioning why we got a puppy when, for the past seven years, we’ve been saying we didn’t want to get a dog because it would tie us down too much in retirement. Then we retired and got a dog. Fair point. The thing with retirement is how you imagine yourself spending your time doesn’t necessarily mesh with how you end up wanting to spend your time. We still want to travel, but we’ve done a lot of international travel over the years and there are plenty of dog-friendly travel options within North America, plus we have dog sitters for when we do travel overseas. The challenge with doing longer-term travel during retirement is that you have to balance that with building a life locally. It’s hard to do regular volunteer work or take a course or get into the “groove” of retired life if you keep taking off for months at a time. Just as when we were deciding whether or not to have a child, we sat down and did a pros and cons list. In both cases, we looked at the long list of cons and the rather short (but harder to quantify) list of pros, and said, “Oh, let’s just do it.” Some decisions are meant to be made with the heart.

I’ve warned Nick that he’s no longer the cutest kid on the block, so to speak, and that he might need to up his game a bit to get the same level of attention and spoiling he’s used to. I also pointed out that he’ll probably get less “blog press” now that Juno is in the picture.

Having said that, he had another follow-up appointment a couple of weeks ago and there are no areas of concern, so that’s pretty awesome. 🙂

Nick wasn’t with us on our trip, so he only got to spend a day with Juno before heading to Montreal with friends for the weekend. They bonded quickly though, with Juno having a particular fondness for Nick’s ears. Nick has less of a fondness for having his ears licked by a dog.