September was a big bank bust, after the birthdays, the iPod, the PC replacement, the dog adoption... We should be eating top ramen for the rest of the year.  I was adding up Daisy's cost, and between the adoption fee, the vet, and the pet supplies, it's another huge expense.  I guess it's a good thing she's not stinky or anything... Oh wait. 

Since she was spayed a day before we picked her up, we're not supposed to give her a bath so that her stitches can heal properly.  So now she smells so much like a dog that we are smelling like a dog house.  Phew.  So, more air freshners and open windows for us.

This week has been a challenge, with dog training taking up most of our free time.  We can't really go on normal walkies yet because Daisy is so keen on chasing everything.  Has been feeling more than land skiing than anything, our shoulders slightly out of place from all that yanking.  That said, she had already learned to sit, shake, and lay down within a week.  So that's pretty good if you ask me.  Daisy has still got the cold, so she's hacking like a senior citizen who's been smoking all her life.  It's a little disconcerting waking up to that sound, halfway expecting a pool of vileness to follow the horrid sound.  But it hasn't happened yet, thankfully.  She's also a rather poor bedmate, sticking limbs in our backs and occupying open spaces with her body, disabling our ability to toss or turn.  This morning, after I took her potty at 6:30 am and failed to fall back asleep, she even decided to snuggle up with me by placing her head on my shoulder.  It would be tremendously endearing had not her doggie breath occupying every breath I drew.

But if it hasn't been evidently obvious, we are smitten with this terrier.  She has been...

Well, she just peed in the house.  Better go reclaim our scent back.  Grrr. 

We decided to head back to the Bellevue shelter regardless that we've been here the last two days and we looked at two different animals, Tina, a beagle mixed with terrier maybe, and Barney, a dashund.  Tina has a good personality, very playful, and a tad big for the kids when she's on her hind legs.  We were worried about that primarily, because the kids seemed to be frightened of her.  Barney was more easy going, but she was a Dashund and I guess I had some kind of biased, in that a pet should never, by default, look ridiculous.  No disportionate body parts for me, thank you very much.  

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I'm just gonna skip right ahead to the results, since I don't want to write as if it were just happening, since it has already been a day.  We ended up getting "Tina", the terrier even though the kids preferred the Dashund.  Tina actually scared the kids a little because on her hind legs, she posed a big licking threat.  Ultimately it came down to this, we needed a dog that would outlive the current novelty of having a small dog.  Right now a small dog is good, but when the kids are older, they would be stuck with a dog that can't run fast, jump much, and would be mortally wounded by a frisbee.  We needed a dog that the adults would like because it's not a kids plaything, it's a family pet that the parents would be primarily responsible for.  So we went for the terrier.  Shortly after we left the shelter with her, it was already decided that her name would be Daisy.  It didn't even take a few years, but later in the evening as the kids are running with the dog, I knew we had made the right choice.