First Blog

This is my first blog ever. My name is Amy, I'm 39 years old and I live in rural North East Texas. Since I love dogs more than anything in the world, it was only natural for me to do a blog about dogs. I am married to Bryan and we have 4 canine children. I can't have human children, so my dogs are my children. And as far as they are concerned, they are human.

My oldest child is Al, who is a 14 year old black lab mix. My husband adopted Al before we got together. He wandered up to Bryan's house when he was about 4 months old and Bryan took him in. He's very gentle and even though he is the oldest, he's the low man on the totem pole. He has no desire for dominance and pretty much just goes with the flow. When Al was younger, he use to love to go dove hunting. He still enjoys going out to the lake and swimming. He will retrieve sticks and toys that we throw into the lake until he's tired and then he will leave the item in the water about 3 or 4 feet away from land so that we can't get it. When he's ready to play again, he will go back into the water, retrieve the item and return it to us. LOL

My next to oldest child is Katie, who is a 9 year old German Shepherd mix. One day, while taking the long way home in the middle of the country, my husband and I saw a bone thin pup scrounging in the ditch looking for food. We turned the car around and she got in the center of the road (right on the yellow stripe) and started running from us. She pulled over at an abandoned house, turned around to face our car and just sat down to watch us. I got out of the car and talked calmly to her as I slowly approached her. When I was about 6 or 7 feet from her, I squatted down and she began talking to me. Yes, Katie "talks" instead of "barks". She told me her whole story and when I said "Well, come here then" and held out my arms to her, she ran to me and climbed up in my lap. As soon as she walked into our house she took over and everyone treated her like a princess. After 9 years, she is still the most dominant dog and is still considered the princess.

My youngest son is Billy, who is 8 years old and a total mutt - even his vet doesn't know what he is. He is the apple of my eye. Our friends and family claim that Billy and I both don't realize that I didn't actually give birth to him. LOL! We rescued Billy from the local pound (at that time there weren't any no-kill shelters in our area). When we got Katie, we had Al and Pickles (Pickles died of old age two years ago this past January - I still miss her terribly) and Katie was driving them insane with all her energy. Bryan and I went to the pound to find her a play mate and there was a whole litter of black and white puppies. All but one of the puppies were up at the gate jumping up and begging for attention. But there was one little pup who was cowering in the back corner, shaking and terrified. As soon as my eyes met his, I knew he was meant to be my baby. He's still scared of most people, but he loves his parents and siblings fiercely! :-)

The baby of the family is Pearl, who is 2 years old this month and is part Red Bone Coon Hound (as far as we can tell). Not too far from where we found Katie, Bryan saw 3 puppies that had been dumped on the side of the road. They were about 4 weeks old, so he scooped them up and brought them home. Before he even got home I had found homes for each of them. We had no idea how young they were, so we thought they were dachshunds. Since this was a Friday, they were scheduled to go to their new homes the following Monday. But by Sunday we could tell one of the pups was very ill. We took her to the vet first thing Monday morning and found out that she had parvo. She spent a whole week in the hospital and barely pulled through it. Our vet, being the wonderful man that he is, didn't charge us full price since he knew this was a stray that we had just picked up, but it still ended up costing us over $600, so we ended up keeping her and naming her Pearl (due to the one white paw she has). Pearl has won the hearts of every person and dog that she has met! Oh, and we realized that she wasn't a dachshund when she got up to a whopping 55 pounds! LOL

This is just an introduction to our family, and I plan on telling each kids' story on separate pages. I think they're each so wonderful, that they deserve their own little spot light. :-)