Family of 3 Becomes Family of 4!

We got a dog! If you thought it was something else than you clearly don’t know me very well. One and done parents right here.

Anyway, we went to the Abu Dhabi Animal Shelter a few days ago and Tyler just fell in love with a Husky mix. He really started liking Siberian Huskies over a year ago when he had a class assignment about them. Every time I would see a video of a Husky doing something cute and slightly annoying, I would show him so he could see how talkative and annoying they could be. I thought I was driving home the message that they were not the right kind of dog for us but that plan apparently backfired.

Speaking of plans backfiring, I have spent the past 3- or 4-years distracting Tyler with the promise of a dog. It all started years ago when he said something along the lines of wishing he had a brother or sister. When pointing out all the negative things about having of sibling didn’t work, I distracted him with the idea of getting a dog. “Wouldn’t you much rather have a dog?” He would get so excited about that idea. I would follow it up with, “If you had a dog, what would you name it?”. He would forget all about wanting a sibling and I would always have to end the conversation with, “Well, we can’t get a dog right now because of the cats, but someday”.

This strategy was followed by using the idea of a dog to make our move to Abu Dhabi more exciting. Since the cat(s), more on them later, would not be able to make the move with us due to their health and old age, the window for getting a dog would be more open. So anytime Abu Dhabi didn’t sound like a good idea, or he thought he wanted a sibling, we would talk about our future dog.

Now back to the cats. When I was in college in Fort Worth, I adopted 2 cats from the pet store that I worked at. I am horrible at naming pets so I kept the names that they came with. BJ was a black sweetheart that was a little over a year old. Dweezil was an orange and white goofball that was a little under a year old. Other than when they spent a few years at my parents so I could move to San Diego and then join me after Brian and I had bought our house in 2010, they were with me their whole life.

In the Fall of 2019 BJ’s health started to fade but he lived a happy loving life until we had to put him down in the Fall of 2020, he was 18. Dweezil became my co-worker while I worked from home during Covid and wanted lots of love and attention from me. As our moving date got closer and closer, I started to worry more and more about what I was going to do with him. He has never been in the best of health, renal failure, heart murmur, hyperthyroidism, etc. Luckily, at the very last minute, literally the very last minute, a nurse at our veterinarian’s office said that she found another vet that was willing to take him in and if that didn’t work out, she would be happy to take him home.

I was, and am, extremely grateful for them both. The vet that adopted him sent me updates about once a week in the beginning to let me know how he was settling in. We have emailed back and forth a few times since then and Dweezil is doing great. He seems to be very comfortable in his new home and is just living out his sunset years as best as he can.

So fast forward to about a month or so ago when we were reading one of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books. The main character Greg was talking about how he thought his neighbors kept having babies on purpose in attempts to film something funny at their birthday parties for the fictional version “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. Tyler stopped me midsentence and said, “Wait, you can have babies on purpose?”. Brian and I laughed and said yes, which led to Tyler saying, “Then make me a brother”. We laughed again, and reminded him that we were not having any more kids followed by the distraction of a dog. But guess what, I had run out of excuses. There were no cats and we were pretty settled in Abu Dhabi, not to mention the weather is now beautiful. Plus, we figured it would be really good for him at this point.

So now our family of 3 has become a family of 4. Tyler has named her Icee but I keep calling her Baby Girl, I told you I am bad with pet names. She got to come home this past Sunday and has been an extremely good dog so far.

She was brought to the shelter, get this, ON TYLER’S BIRTHDAY! A construction crew found her on their site and brought her in. She was microchipped but nobody ever came to claim her. They estimate that she was born in April of 2020 and had her listed as a Husky mix. She hasn’t been spayed yet, so we will have to schedule that in the next couple of weeks. I have only heard her bark once and that was when she needed to go outside. She has met a couple of dogs, one of the stray cats that live in our complex, and a baby, she did extremely well. She does get pretty distracted by the birds so I think that might be her weakness.

I was so nervous about getting a dog since we live in an apartment, you know the barking, the potty training, the socialization, and general responsibility, but she seems to be just the perfect dog for us. Welcome to the family Icee!