Our Dogs

I mentioned that I'd likely be posting about our dogs, and this seems a good day for it as I've spent a good portion of the weekend caring for one of them. (will get to that later..)
People are always saying that small dogs and small children don't mix. I think that depends a lot on the dogs and the children. We currently have 3 small dogs. They love small children. Our grand daughter (baby G) is currently living with us (her parents too..) and she just loves the dogs. She's two and a half right now, but she spent time up here a few times over the last 2 years so we have had the chance to see them react to her at different ages.
They adore her. We never had any qualms about leaving her alone with the pommies.

The youngest one, Gobo, is 3 and will occasionally want to play "rough" which pretty much means she'll wind up getting licked to death. He was born with several birth defects, the most noticeable one being that he doesn't have the traditional pommie tail. Oddly, this seems to allow him better balance on 2 legs and he will often stand up and walk around to beg for attention. He also has some problems with is "boy bits" which we have to keep an eye on. They tried repairing some of it in surgery, but it didn't work because there were even more things wrong then we'd realized. But he is doing well now. Just have to keep an eye on things. This weekend he's apparently been bitten by something and managed to chew a large raw spot on his back, so he's been a bit needy this weekend while I'm trying to keep him from making things worse. That all seems to be settling down now though, and as long as I can keep him away from the sore, he should be ok and start healing soon.


Gir is a little older and a little more stand off-ish.. she's also the smallest of the dogs and has never really liked the hubbub. But she will sit and be petted and if the others start to get too excited, she just leaves. We got her from the same breeder we got Gobo from, though she is not from the same lines. She'd been brought up here to add to the breeding stock then, once she got here, it was discovered that she had bad knees (which you want to breed out, not in..) and was underweight, so she couldn't be used for breeding. So we got called to see if we would take her or knew of anyone who would and she joined our little gang. Turned out she also had 4 extra teeth in her mouth and a bunch of other dental problems. She wound up having to have 16 teeth pulled.. Sadly, her teeth are still bad and we might have to have more pulled. She is a total joy, though. She gets so excited to see us, she spins and dances around the floor.




Willow was the only one we were ever really concerned with. She's a 9 year old Jack Russell. Very dominant personality, very protective. She was a little snappy when we first got her a few years ago. (All of our dogs have basically been rescues of one sort or another.) And she still has her moments. (For instance, she really hates the oven. We have no idea why, but she will attack the couch or a toy or something or run around barking at it when we open the oven. We really don't understand this, but are trying to work with her on this.) We got her from a friend of a friend. They were headed off to college and her parents had told her to find a new home for the dog or they were going to shoot her, because they wanted a rottweiler. I really hope they didn't get such a big, powerful dog.. We've been told that Willow is actually pretty mellow for her breed, but there is no number of pommies that can prepare you for a JRT, even a "mellow" one..
So we were a little worried at first about how she would react to baby G.
Willow has been wonderful with her. We were rather surprised at how quickly she took to her. Willow has always been very protective of "her" girls (B2 and M) and it seems baby G is now in that fold. If Gobo gets "rowdy", Willow will come stand between and push Gobo away. If she thinks anyone is going to hurt G, she does the same thing. There's only been one incident where G was tugging on Willow's ear while she was trying to eat. Willow didn't like that and let G know. No skin was broken, Willow knows she gets in BIG trouble over that, but she will bare her teeth and can be very scary looking. They never get left alone, either way, but it is also good for G to learn there are limits and that you should be nice to animals.

I'm really sad that I can't include one other dog on this list. The first dog we got as a family, Pepe, passed away very suddenly in March, so she is no longer with us to be a part of this. However, she was such a big part of our family, and my healing process in coming to terms with infertility, that I might just have to make another post about her later.

Adoption workshop

This past weekend hubby and I went to a 3 day adoption workshop run by pretty much the only non state agency in Alaska (ok, there is one little one up in Fairbanks as well, but for our purposes... ya know..) Catholic Social Services has been doing adoptions in Alaska for over 40 years, so they have a pretty good track record, and even though we're not Catholic, they don't seem to mind. We had previously considered LDS Family Services, but turns out that they tend to farm out most of the paperwork and home studies and such to CSS, so we've decided we might as well just work with them.
It looks like a very good program, they offer lots of counseling for birth families and provide lots of follow up for all sides afterwards. They strongly promote open adoptions, though the level of openness varies and is something that everyone decides and agrees to up front.
It was a great way for Tom to get all caught up and up to speed on things. I've been doing the research on this for years, but he's had other things (like last year's deployment) to keep his mind otherwise occupied, and there were a lot of things he hadn't thought of or didn't know about.
It was a great experience and the next step for us is to set up an appointment to go in and talk to them and get all the paperwork started. That will be waiting a few weeks though as Tom heads back to work on the North Slope tomorrow. Sadly this weekend also saw us both completely mobbed by a nasty virus that had been going around so we took the last few days to recover this week. But we are once again fit and sane and not all doped up on cold meds :) *lol*

Family Info

I should probably start by giving you some information about our little family.
Tom and I were married in January of 2003. I had been living in Salt Lake City and he came down, we got married and then he and his friends moved me on up to Alaska. We had lots of adventures, some good, some not so good. And I got to know Tom's kids from his first marriage. They are pretty much a good bunch of kids, though some of them aren't really "kids" anymore...
B1 is the oldest gal, she's 23 and has a little family of her own. They've recently moved in with us temporarily while they save up money and look for a house. Has been loads of fun having her, C and "baby" G.. big changing having a 2.5 year old in the house, but great practice :)
D is the only boy of the lot (there was another, but he passed away at about a year old, so I never knew him..) He will be 22 later this year. D is a good kid, but is currently having a hard time figuring out who he is and what he really wants to do with his life. We're hoping he will get that all figured out soon, but until then we wait and love him.
B2 is 16 and working on getting her driver's license. She was just elected class president for next year and vp of her speech and debate club. She is also really into swimming and track. She's a great kid and really seems to know who she is in herself.
M is the youngest. She was 4 when we married, and will be 12 later this year. She has really grown up. We're still not sure where she's going yet, but it does look like she and B2 are geek girls.. and we couldn't be prouder :)

We also have several dogs. The current round is composed of Willow, a 9 year old Jack Russell Terrier, (B2's dog, really.. she's perfect for the girls, she is very very protective of them) Gobo, a 3 year old Pomeranian, and Gir, a 4 year old Pomeranian. Pepe and Rocky were our other dogs, both pommies, who might get mentioned from time to time. Rocky passed away about 3 years ago and Pepe just earlier this spring. We loved them dearly and miss them. They are definitely part of the family.

More later on each of us individually. :)

Beginnings

We are about to embark on the official beginning of our adoption journey and I decided that it would be a good idea to keep a record of this process for myself and others who are out there on the same journey.
I will soon be chronicling our family story and how we have come to this point, who we are, what we believe, how we live, etc. But for today I just wanted to sit down and say hello. We, like most families, are a complex mix of things. For the sake of their privacy, I will likely be using initials instead of names for some members of the family unless or until I get their permission to do otherwise. Same may apply to other friends who might get brought up from time to time.
More later....