Where Have I Been?

Where have I been? Mostly studying. A lot has happened since last semester when I started this blog. I’m now living with my best friend just up the road from Uni (which has helped heaps in lessening the study load). We’ve also just welcomed a new family member into our life; a gorgeous baby girl, of the furry variety.

Her mum is beautiful with a matching temperament. She’s a staffy x border collie, and shares my name. Dad is a blue heeler, solid and well built, but good with his pups. The little girl herself, yet to be named, looks almost like a rottie puppy with her colouring and adorable baby face. I can’t wait to see her grow.

Tymikka and I are sharing the responsibilities of ownership, and the rewards it’ll bring to our lives. When we first moved in we joked about how the house (named Mae) was missing knee high moving trip hazards. She had her four year old twin sisters always beneath her feet, while I’d always had my family’s dog Jasper beneath mine. We spoke about how we’d love to get a dog for ourselves when we could afford it.

Little did we know it would happen so quickly, but when we sent an enquiry, within the half hour we were in the car to go meet our baby girl for the first time.

She was the last in the litter to find a new home, but when we went in to see them, both our eyes fell on her, and Tymikka looked at me as if to say, “she’s so adorable, she can’t be the last one picked, where is the last one?”. Only she was, and the lady pointed her out and put her in our arms and we knew we’d have a dog of our own in a few short weeks.

Those short weeks seem to be stretching out forever now.

We’ve got most things sorted and planned. Actually, we have almost everything planned, this is us. We plan for everything and more. We are also Uni students, and I’ve been researching all the pros and cons of everything puppy related. I’m probably researching too much, to be honest. Luckily, I’m learning all about vaccinations in my current Uni course, so at least I understand those and can rely on educated teachers rather than google, at least where vaccinations and disease is concerned.

Puppy food choice is a hard one. There were so many good and bad reviews on just about everything. We were going to go with the expensive yet higher quality Black Hawk, but then the SuperCoat came on special where Tymikka works, so we considered it. I read some reviews swearing by it and some reviews swearing against it. I ended up ringing mum, remembering that we’d once fed a biscuit in a yellow bag to our dogs, before switching to SuperCoat. Turns out I was remembering something from our previous dog, Harley. He passed away when I was younger, much younger, I think about yr2 at primary school. He used to be fed biscuits from a yellow packet.

Jasper, however, has been fed SuperCoat his whole life, the only switch being from the puppy formula to the adult dog formula. He’s only been to the vet a few times, and never for anything that could be related to his diet. Mainly for his needles, and he used to get grass seeds in the pads of his feet constantly, and then when he was bitten by a snake. He has one growth on his thigh, but compared to every other staffy I’ve met, that is practically nothing. He’s very healthy (ignoring maybe his unfitness), and survived on SuperCoat his whole life. It hasn’t seemed to do any harm whatsoever, so I think we’ll give it a go.

This is after weaning her onto it from whatever she was fed as a puppy, of course. At the moment, her ‘wet’ food will either be Pedigree or Optimum, depending on the vets decision when they go at the end of the week. We have puppy treats, ready for training. I’m slowly memorising all the correct ways to train her, hoping that they’ll soon be ingrained into my head so that I remember to do the correct motions instantly in response to her. It’s strange how all this takes up memory, but a completely separate part of my memory to the Uni specific part, which is currently trying to remember the hormones produced by the adrenal gland (I need crying emoji’s on my laptop).

I made her a puppy crate one day when I had too much pent up energy to sit silently and study. I needed to do something physical, so at 7:50pm I took measurements for a bookshelf we had in the spare room and raced to Bunnings for some wood and duct tape. I ended up taking the book shelf apart then putting it together – minus the backboard and two shelves. I then sawed the four pieces of wood to the right measurements (started wishing I had a hacksaw at that point). Putting the pieces inside the shelving unit, which lay perpendicular to its original design, it made a rectangular ‘den’ with sides high enough that she (hopefully) won’t jump out of. Duct tape held them further in place and kept them neat.

The idea is that she won’t pee on her bed, an instinct taught to them from their mothers, tracing right back to the wild dogs (painted dogs or wolf) descendants that lived in dens. Instead of sleeping in our beds and peeing in a corner far enough from where she sleeps, or sleeping in her bed beside us on the floor and peeing in hidden, hard to see (and clean) places on the floor, she’ll hopefully whine when she wakes needing to relieve herself, waking us. And if she doesn’t wake us, we’ll have alarms set every hour anyway, so we can check on her and take her out if she needs.

The shift work will soon begin, with Tymikka mostly taking the night shift (about 11pm – 4am) and me taking the morning shift (4am – 9am). I’ll get her the whole night on Wednesdays, to let Tymikka sleep before work, and she’ll get her the whole night every second Thursday night before my big lab, and on occasional other nights (because apparently lab classes can’t be on an easy schedule but completely randomly spread over the semester).

We just need to clean up the back yard (there’s a few loose sticks from where we were trying to pull out a stump) and fence off the gap behind the shed. And sleep, since we’ll soon be lacking that for a while. Then we wait again. Uni work has never been so boring in my life. Yet I feel I’m also more focused and up-to-date this semester than the last three semesters combined. I don’t know why. I feel like I can study here, have my lectures playing loudly in any part of the house and Tymikka understands, I don’t have the same feeling of confinement to my rooms as I have in all my other houses, because finally I co-own the whole house. Plus, Uni is just down the road so even when my alarm fails to go off I can still make it to lectures amazingly.

And as per usual, I’ve gotten carried away. Our girl is yet to be named, but we have finally ruled the list down to just two; Millie and Mia (pronounced Mee-ah). We have a vote currently in place, and at first Mia was well ahead, then Millie jumped far into the lead. Recently Mia has made a comeback, only for Millie to take a gradual lead of two votes in the last day.

What do you guys think? Mia or Millie. Vote in the comments, or send me an email/message (my Facebook account is now linked through Every Little Bit). Your opinions matter to me, and I’ll try to keep you up to date with Puppy and her life, as well as mine.