Our lives: Gone to the dogs

It’s hard to know when, exactly, to proclaim an otherwise beautiful family experience a disaster, but that does seem to be the way these things go.
One minute you are trekking out to the countryside – over real rivers and through real woods even – to get yourself a fluffy little pup to call your own; the next you are surveying what’s left of your couch and wondering where it all went so horribly wrong.
Dog days. Loyal readers may recall that we began the summer with the acquisition of one adorable puppy.
We had, to that point, been soldiering on for nearly a year with only two cats for animal companionship. Well, two cats and two goats actually.
Yet, with the goats mounting near-daily bids for freedom, their merit as “companions” of any sort was negligible.
They feel to me more like potential escapees than anything else – forever convinced that the grass is greener over the next gate. Not that I don’t appreciate their ongoing commitment to ingesting every last piece of my porch furniture, mind you.
Nevertheless, give me the neediness and codependence of a dog any day.
Just one. Dog. Get it? Singular.
Yet what I have is dogs – plural. Two dogs.
You’ve heard the saying that it’s possible to get too much of a good thing? While I rarely find that to be true in the case of money, backrubs, or banana nut muffins, owning two puppies simultaneously is definitely one of those instances.
Here’s the story. Dog number two (Ace) is a German shepherd. A friend of a relative received him as a gift and realized, early on, that she wasn’t cut out for puppy parenting.
Weren’t we looking for a dog? Well, yes, we had been looking but now we had a dog – a mere puppy really.
Nonetheless, this was a German shepherd: free to a good home and we are not fools (or ones to pass up a deal).
Thus, at nine weeks old he was ours – lock, stock, and as yet unregistered AKC papers. Up to that point the only papers any dog of ours has ever possessed were used in housebreaking.
Mesmerized by his sheer beauty and breeding, we fairly leapt at the chance to give him a good home. And a good home we did give. We just had no idea that our home was quite so