After our previous foster who was adopted by her forever home toward the end of May, we took a bit of a fostering break. I knew that we had some busy life stuff going on so I gave myself the date of end of July and then I just volunteered as much as possible in June and July.

When we began fostering over 2 years ago we always said we weren’t going to take puppies. Only female dogs (who won’t pee on Mr. Ink’s landscaping) who are smaller so that our particular dog Fury appreciates them. Over the years the age of the dogs has become younger and younger, I think the youngest we’ve taken was 6 or 7 months old. When we agree to a dog this young it’s usually due to some medical issue, and in the case of the youngest dog, she’d needed a leg amputation (and she had been starving so we needed to bulk her up.) She was one of our favorite little fosters so we definitely didn’t mind that she was on the young side for our home.

Due to some unexpected mill releases there was some foster dog shuffling in our organization and we ended up agreeing to foster this lovely small dog who looks a little like a tiny boxer.

She’s about 10 months old, so a little younger than we typically take but within our comfort range of ages. We agreed to her a few weeks before she was due to arrive via transport, so I prepared myself as I usually do to accept a new foster in our home and we waited in great anticipation for Saturday, her arrival date.

On Thursday I got a message from the rescue that said “Call me.” Which, honestly, was an alarming message! I called, and we were then told that no one at the shelter we were pulling from had noticed that our little foster dog was pregnant. I was shocked, let me tell you! The rescue made the immediate decision to save her anyhow whether our family was willing to keep her or not. Having puppies in a shelter is awful on the dogs and often fatal for the puppies. But now our family had to make the decision, were we willing to foster her and her litter of puppies or did we need to let someone with puppy experience foster her? Factoring in to this was that there was no other appropriately aged and sized dog that we could take, so we’d be giving her up just to take an even longer and unintentional foster break.

Mr. Ink has always been the major driver behind the no puppies in our home policy. So, I told the rescue I’d run it by him and we’d see what he said, but I was not at all hopeful that the answer would be yes. Then, after work, I went home and spun on the patio waiting for Mr. Ink to come home. Miss Butterfly also came home from her job to be there when Mr. Ink received this news as she wanted to be involved in the decision. Once he came home, we told him our very surprising news and asked him what he thought. And to my surprise, he did not save me from myself, but instead expressed a desire that we have the litter of puppies at our home.

I told the rescue we’d take her anyhow as long as they were willing to provide the support and knowledge we needed to get through this experience we were totally unprepared for. The other foster homes asked later how Mr. Ink was taking the news, so I asked him. And he expressed that while he has been a stepfather 3 times over, he’s never been a father and never experienced the miracle of birth. So he figured this is his chance. We then got to work making a list of names for our puppies.

Fishbone, our tiny little foster dog, 28 pounds and about 2 weeks away from giving birth, arrived on Saturday afternoon. She’s a gorgeous and extremely sweet dog. She gets along beautifully with our dogs. She’s a nervous girl. I don’t think she’s ever been inside a house before. It took about an hour of training to get her to enter our home on Saturday, all of which was done by Miss Butterfly. Which I fully appreciate because I can’t be carrying a pregnant dog in and out of the house every time she needs to potty which is pretty much every half hour because being pregnant is hell on a dog’s bladder in the same way it is for a human.

We spent the remainder of the weekend prepping for our anticipated little school of fish. I have been given some literature and I am caught up through birth and about the first month before my brain was just too full for more information. I’ll talk more about getting prepped in a different post.

But suffice it to say, our family is going on a grand adventure together this year without ever leaving our city.