Our Happy Family Will Be Complete

Well, the good news is that Bandit the dog will be arriving at our house tomorrow, delivered by his current owners Ben, Jen, and little Audrey. We've met Bandit once before at his home in Michigan, and are very excited to have him as a part of our family.

I've grown up with many, many household pets including dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, hermit crabs, cats, birds, and hamsters. I've missed having a dog of my own—while we lived at my parents', I shamelessly stole their dog and walked her, petted her, tried to claim her as my own. But now, finally, I really will have a dog!

Keith, on the other hand, has never had a dog. Believe it or not, he actually talks about getting a dog even more than I do. So both of us are thrilled that it's actually going to happen. At this time tomorrow ... we'll still be anxiously awaiting Bandit's arrival, because they're not coming until around noon. But at this time on Sunday, we'll have a dog!

What we've been debating for the past several days is whether or not we should change his name. In the many years that we've talked about getting pets, we've chosen a few of our favorite names: Gomez and Beckett. The cat is going to be Gomez (which is a whole different story), so should we change Bandit's name to Beckett? Jen assures me that Bandit would adapt very readily. Keith read one website that suggested you should always change an animal's name, but the reasoning wasn't applicable in this situation: their argument is that you don't know how the animal was treated by its previous owners and how his/her name was used, so you should start with a clean slate.

However, we know that Jen and Ben treat their animals extremely well and are very loving parents so that's not a concern. I don't know .... maybe once we get him it'll be easy to decide. Either way, the most important thing is that we're getting a dog!

Unfortunately, I was planning on blogging yesterday about how we'd gotten Gomez from the APL and how wonderful she was and all the fun, frolicking we were doing .... but the APL is holding out on us. We put a hold on her last Friday a week ago. At the time, she was waiting to be spayed--the worker told us that it would probably happen early this week, Tuesday at the earliest. Well, when Keith called yesterday she still hadn't even been operated on and the worker mentioned something about there being a "Kittyfest" of some sort. So pretty much, since Gomez already has a home, they're going to push her to the back of the list and operate on all of the kittens that are still looking for homes.

I know their goal is to get animals adopted, but really. Doesn't the fact that she has owners who are very eager for her to come home count for anything? So our happy family will be complete hopefully soon, but not quite as soon as I'd hoped.