Our Newest Endeavor

After a lot of discussion and a lot of fear that maybe we were diving in too soon, we decided to get another dog. It was a hard decision and one that I still have a lot of guilt over, but not one which either of us regret. We miss Radar every single moment of every single day and in no way are we thinking that we can ever replace him. But there are some things that have been hard that we didn't anticipate. We miss just having a dog: walking it, feeding it, playing with it, etc. In a lot of ways, we've gone downhill since we haven't had one. There's less cleaning up you do because there's no dog getting int it. A.P. started sleeping in later in the mornings because he didn't have Radar to walk anymore. That may seem like a good thing, but it made A.P.'s mornings harder. Not having Radar also made our evenings harder. It used to be that for both of us the end of the night signal was Radar's last walk. After he passed away, we found ourselves staying up later. But most of all, we just missed having a dog. Though our cat, Zuzu, was ruling the house and hanging out with us a lot more, which we loved, there was definitely a hole in our little family that a dog used to fill. Cats are wonderful, but dogs are a different kind of pet. And we missed having one.

So, after much discussion and debate, we decided to add a new member to our family. Meet Ollie! His real name is Oliver, but we call him Ollie (also a nice play on words since an ollie is a skateboard trick, too). He's the same kind of breed as Radar was (half Chihuahua, half Miniature Poodle) since we didn't want a large dog in our small space, but that's about where their similarities end. Ollie looks much more Chihuahua than Radar and his coloring and face are totally different. He's 3 months old and 2.5 lbs. of crazy. He basically spends his days running around, chewing the crap out of everything until he's too tired to keep his eyes open and he collapses. It's hilarious. He's pretty entertaining, particularly when he attacks his tail, plays fetch, or does somersaults because he's trying to attack his penis. Seriously. It's pretty cute.

I can't say that everyone in the house loves him. Zuzu was none too pleased to see there was a new dog in the house. Despite her hatred of the new beastie, she was very kind to him. But after about a week, she gave up on that. Honestly, though, that's Ollie's fault; he chases her around constantly, trying to get her to play with him. Hopefully, they'll get to a point where they get along fine, like she and Radar did. Until then, she waits until he's collapsed before she comes and hangs out with us. Don't worry, though! I make sure she gets lots of love, too.

Anyway, here are some pictures of our new buddy! Expect to see more in the future, like all the pets in our household, they're over photographed. : )

1st night home...before we fully learned the insane dog we'd taken in.

Note that most of these pictures are of him when he is sleeping. Sadly, that's the only time you can get him to be still enough to take a photo.

(Photos by me!)