A new arrival

My daughter has wanted a dog for…well…as long as I can remember. We’ve always said no as with all the grown ups in the house working and the non-grown ups being at school, it didn’t seem fair to have a dog and then probably have to pay someone else to look after it during the day. COVID changed that though. There was no way we were going to get a dog during the pandemic (even if you could get one at a reasonable price!) however now that’s over and the working-from-home thing is now a settled way of life…there was less reason to say no.

So we decided to start looking.

My daughter did most of the work in terms of research…looking at all things dog related, what kind of dog would suit us? How to go about buying one without getting involved with puppy farms or dubious “breeders”? It all sounded a bit daunting to be honest. Another rub is that noone in the house drives so we had to find a dog that we could actually get to. We looked at rescues, I certainly wasn’t against the idea but it seemed impossible to find a suitable adoptee. I had a dog as a kid and feel quite confident about looking after one however I didn’t feel able to deal with a dog that may have issues. Am I a bad person? Maybe but it just wasn’t going to work out.

So, we started looking for a puppy and we thought a cocker spaniel sounded the right type of dog for us. My daughter scoured various websites and listings. I thought it was going to take a while but within a couple of weeks of concerted looking she came across a listing that looked promising. Cocker spaniel puppies, born at the beginning of November and ready to be collected on December 30th…within an easy train ride. We made the call and arranged a viewing.

We met two beautiful little cocker spaniel puppies and their lovely mum. A little “red” boy and a black and tan girl. The boy was adventurous and already a bit of a character. The girl was more chilled. How do you choose?

We spent a while chatting to the breeder, who was really great…very knowledgeable, and enthusiastic, about spaniels. Telling us all about the things to look out for, recommending puppy training. It all went really well. We left saying that we’d think about it however having a chat with the rest of the family on the phone before we got on the train home we made the decision to go for it and phoned the breeder to reserve the black and tan girl.

We now had a few weeks to get ourselves ready to pick up our new arrival on December 30th.

We arranged to go back to see her once more before picking her up.

She’d already grown a bit. She was still pretty chilled while her brother was all over the place! Then as it was christmas, we couldn’t really see her again until we picked her up on December 30th.

Having bought all the necessary puppy accessories we headed off on December 30th to pick her up. A friend drove us as we thought a train ride was probably a little too much for an 8 week old puppy. Documents signed, money paid, we brought her home.

What do we do now? The first few nights were interesting. One of us slept in the living room with her and there was a fair amount of whining! There were also the 2 or 3 am toilet outings to the garden. She settled really quickly though and within a week we didn’t need to be with her all night. We’re still getting up at 2 or 3 am to let her out.

We’re still spending a lot of our time googling various topics, worrying about whether we’re doing things right. She seems pretty happy. We’re booked in for a 5 week puppy training course in February…more for us than for her really…otherwise YouTube is our friend at the moment.

So, after thinking about it for a long time…it all seems to have happened so quickly. We have a dog!