A – Another way that my plan to have a one-and-done experience with our first dog was scuttled was that she passed away much sooner than expected. We had only 16 months with her. After she died, I realized I never wanted to live in a dogless house, and so we adopted more dogs. I appreciated that we got to meet all our wonderful dogs because of the efforts of dedicated fosters, and I wanted to pay it forward. I was not an experienced dog owner, so I wasn’t sure I was up to the job of fostering an adult dog or that my current dogs would be a good fit for that. Luckily, the rescue we work with has a “puppy team,” and we can foster litters of puppies. We generally take three or four at a time (although we’ve had as many as five—that was exciting!), and they are adopted relatively quickly, typically after a few weeks. So while our big dogs aren’t always thrilled with the pipsqueaks, they’ve come to tolerate it, knowing that it’s temporary. As you know, puppies are just little joy machines.
I don’t know that I have any particularly funny stories other than generic ones about how insanely destructive and gross puppies are, which are funny to me because I have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old. Now we turn our dining room into a corralled puppy pen, but before that, I would just fence off the kitchen area and let them run free, and they just ate the kitchen cabinets! They ate my dining-room breakfront and door too, but I’ve fixed those and have a workaround to prevent that going forward. They are devious little stinkers, and I say that with love. My take is that you can have either nice stuff or dogs, but you have to pick one, and those dogs won. A five-dog litter that was an absolute chaos army became very quiet, so I went and checked on them and saw that they had gotten into the garbage and were eating scraps of tin foil with food on it—they had shiny poo for a couple of days. The second time I fostered, I didn’t know to bring a crate, and I didn’t know that most puppies get off transport and then spend their first 20 minutes off the bus pooping nonstop. My daughter was with me, and we’re driving these two little puppies home. They are just rioting around the back of my car, pooping it up, and she is gagging and hanging her head out the window on the highway. (My superpower is that I’m basically immune to puppy poop, thank goodness.) Our very first foster puppy was an absolute angel but just wanted to chew on Willow’s ears, so every time I saw him go for that, I stuck my arm in his mouth instead, which I said was like getting the world’s worst acupuncture for a week. He was also given to us housebroken, but he came into our house and literally had diarrhea in three rooms in the first 15 minutes. See, gross and destructive, so not really humorous for a broad audience. I’m sorry!
