Nokes (Our Dog)
April 9, 2007
Today Nokes started going up the deck and the stairs all by himself. He is still really nervous about going down, he paws at the door and dashes backwards, it’s pretty cute.
April 8, 2007
Last night was miserable. I woke up every two hours to check on the dog, all I could think about was the mistakes I made with Kellogg, and I was just so worried all night, I barely slept, and I don’t think Sarah did much either.
We had to leave him alone a lot today. There was the long church service, and then later on during the day when we had lunch with friends. He did really well, he whined in the crate, but we expected that. The second time we got home, it may have been too long, he had some small sprinkles the moment we let him out of the crate, and when I got him outside he took a really long pee.
He has been really good so far, going very little inside at all. He grasped a lot of things right away, going potty outside, and he already does some sitting for treats, food, and water.
He got more rambuntious today, starting to bite a little more and not letting us pet him as gently as we got to yesterday. But he also got a lot more playful today, he was sprinting outside all over, hopping, eating grass and just being a cute puppy. It makes me that much more sad to think about Kellogg, and how sick he must have been. He just must have felt terrible a lot of the time, I don’t think he ever had this energy or stamina, especially on the first day.
Later on tonight we celebrated Sarah’s birthday, and started to tell people about him. We got some photos online for people, settled a little more on a name of “Nokes”. We had started with “Shark” because of the way he would crawl towards you on all fours, but it didn’t roll off your tongue how I liked, so even though it was different I didn’t think I wanted to call him that all of his life.
Today he climbed up the ledge and the steps to the house after we let him out, so that was really impressive, and he seems to be eating and drinking everything we put in front of him. He started to chew on the rattle fish a little today, as well as the blue bone. Sarah took him through the whole upstairs today, letting him explore, he is really curious. He loves to play underneath the bed, hiding, crawling around and exploring, it is really cute.
April 7, 2007
Thursday I went down to Petsmart looking to see what they had available for dogs, but there wasn’t barely any. On Friday Sarah did the same, and nothing new. Late Saturday, I was working in the garage when Sarah came out and told me she had phoned the two Pet locations, and that Petsmart still had two dogs left for the second shelter there. She wanted to go, it was about time for them to leave (5:30), so we had to hurry.
The two dogs were lab mixes. The last thing I want is a lab anything, too much energy and too high maintenance. So, we went back to PAK to see if they had anything new by chance. The aisle was long, and stretched out ahead of us, and there in the distance, we saw one little brown puppy in a cage by himself. Both of us got tears in our eyes, he looking strinkingly like Kellogg.
I picked him up and let him roam around outside the cage a little bit, he seemed really calm. He wandered some, but didn’t show too much interest in me at all. We asked about him, apparently a litter was dropped off Friday night, all different colors. The in store vet thought that he was Terrier and Shepherd mixed, and after looking at some photos, we started to see the rat terrier in his ears.
We were still kind of debating about fostering him, getting him checked out for any major problems when the lady came over and said that if we wanted him, we could just keep him. If he went back with her, she’d have to put him in a kennel and she just wanted a good home for him. You can’t beat that, free, so we decided at the very least we would take him for now and have him checked out.
When we got him home he really warmed up to us. I noticed right away that he was quite different from Kellogg the more you look at him. He was a little bigger, and he seemed to have a lot more energy. But even though he has a lot of energy, he seems to be pretty calm and easy going, not too excitable. We boiled all of the old toys, and right away he seemed to latch onto the tennis ball and “Thing 1”, the Dr. Seuss character.
We had to do some running around, so we took him with us since we had just got back. So right away, he got to meet Kenny and Lori. I was pretty paranoid of him being in a house where there were other dogs, so we just held on to him the whole time.
Some of the traits we started to notice, he likes to hide. He will crawl behind me and the couch and just lay there and sleep, or chew on a toy. He also just loves the outside, he will dash around and have a grand old time. It is also really cute how when he runs really fast, his ear tuck down and it is like little leaps so close to the ground. He comes up to you, tries to bite at your face and just loves to jump.
