pepper is gone. she was adopted into a forever home on tuesday and i have been a wreck ever since. i knew that giving her up would be hard, but i didn’t know it would be the hardest thing i ever had to do. she was only with us for a week, but that was more than enough time for me to fall in love.
on a positive note… i get to sleep more than 4 hours at night. there’s no more doggy poop to pick up. there’s no pup to chase after every time she climbs out of the pen. there are no more pee spots to clean out of our carpet. our trash isn’t filled with stinky you-know-what. i can leave the house for more than an hour at a time.
but i would trade all of those things to have pepper back.
everyone is so shocked to hear how very attached to her i had become in such a short time. she’s not even close to the type of dog that i’ve always wanted! but i think it happened because she was so affectionate and sweet and we spent every waking hour together. she loved to curl up in my lap while i was working on my laptop and take naps with me while lying on my chest. she loved keeping me company on long rides in the car. and she hated it when i left her alone for even a short time.
pepper’s new family is a really nice couple who lives in oakland. they seem like wonderful people who are committed to taking good care of her and raising her as part of their family. but one of the reasons that parents give up their babies for adoption is to give them a better home and a better life. the thing i am struggling with is that i’m not convinced that pepper wouldn’t have had the best life staying with us. i never had to leave her alone during the day because i was working from home. we have a backyard in which she was free to run wild — and she did! her new family lives in a town home with no backyard, and they both work full time. i hope pepper is not frightened when she is left alone in their bathroom while they go off to work. i do miss her, but most of all, i just want her to have a happy, healthy life.
that said, i am ready to raise our own puppy. and i think that right now is the perfect time to do that. since it’s around the holidays, i can work from home a lot, and there will be plenty of opportunities to socialize the pup. now it’s just a matter of mike and i agreeing on what kind of dog to get — we’re still an order of magnitude apart. i’d like a 150 lb dog. he wants a 10 lb-er. i thought that a fair compromise would be a 80 lb dog, but mike didn’t agree. the one thing we agree on is that we want a dog that has short hair and doesn’t shed a lot =P any ideas?