A New Addition to the Family

A while back, we brought home our little friend, Rosie, our kitten. Well, we've welcomed a new furbaby into our family...
Meet Autumn!

She is an eleven week old Boxer/Golden Retriever mix and is maybe the sweetest doggy ever.

DOH and I had talked for a long time about getting a dog, researched different breeds we might be interested in and had decided to start keeping an eye out for dogs we might be interested in purchasing/adopting, either through a shelter, a foster home, or a good family.

We wound up adopting Autumn from a foster family yesterday and are so pleased we did. While she's nearly three months old, there is a lot of work to be done, because her previous owners (prior to the foster home) were very neglectful (which I cannot understand; how can anyone neglect a puppy?!). We're working on all the basics, from sit and stay to getting her to go potty outside only. We realize it's a large undertaking, but I'd rather do it now while we only have one very independent 3 1/2 year old (a letter to Lizzie is long over due, look for one later this weekend!), rather than waiting another four or five years to get a dog after baby number two is at a more independent stage.

DOH has been amazing. He's the one who found out about Autumn and has been doing a ton of research regarding how to train a dog, different stages of a puppy's development, and has been great in sharing the chore the last two days of taking Autumn out to got potty and for walks in the rain (something Autumn isn't terribly thrilled about).

For now, I feel like our little family is kind of complete (I still think we need a fourth human, but we'll be working on that some months down the road). It's such a wonderful feeling, having this little puppy in our family, and, as Charlie Brown says:

Misplaced Baby Fever

I mentioned last night in my letter to Lizzie that we recently have made a new acquisition: a kitten named Rosie! She was named by my husband in honor of Caillou's little sister (if you're not familiar with Caillou, it's a telelvision show on PBS that Lizzie is obsessed with). We are all absolutely in love and thrilled to have a kitten in the house again. (We had literally lost our wonderful three-year-old cat Angus about a month ago, and are afraid that he's met his end somewhere in the woods behind our house.)

Now, I'm not normally one of those people who gets super obsessed or even overly attached to family pets (no "furbabies" here--though I did really love Angus), but some sort of switch went off when we decided to get this new kitten, and I blame it on some major baby fever I've been having. Since we decided to wait (again) on the whole second baby deal (talk to me next summer), I found myself more than willing to throw myself into the "parenting" of our new kitten. I'm researching how to "kitten proof" your house (coincidentally, it's not that different from baby proofing), how to litter train, what the best food for a kitten is, and what sort of toys are. It also led to an hour in Wal-Mart and $30 shelled out...despite the fact that we already had all the basics at home. But who could resist this?:

Rosie is really sweet and has certainly grown more comfortable in our house over the last couple of days. It's so nice to have another little life in the household!

I'm looking forward to seeing what little shenanigans Rosie and Lizzie get up to over the years!