Winchester

Meet Winchester: 

This was the first day that I met Winchester. He is a red/blue heeler boy puppy, brought to me in my classroom by two well-meaning students. With unabashed glee, they presented him to me with a little blue ribbon bow around his neck, exclaiming gleefully that he was an early wedding present (this was about two weeks before the wedding). 

For anyone who has ever raised a puppy (or not), I would guess you can imagine all the flood of thoughts that assaulted my brain in the few seconds of my initial reaction. And of course, I had an audience to my reaction, waiting on baited breath to see if I was joyful as well, hoping and crossing their fingers that they had pleased me. 

I think the first words out of my mouth were "Jon's going to kill you!" 

He wouldn't, of course--Husband is much too sweet for that--and he wasn't difficult at all to convince about the puppy. I'm not sure that I would even claim that there was any convincing required. 

But I had to do some mental convincing. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am without question a dog person. I love dogs. I love having dog. We had one when I was a kid, and when I was a young college student, I got my first dog. One that followed me everyone and became my little shadow and loved me the most. I love having a dog. When I got a wild hair and moved a 1000 miles from home in the dead of winter all by myself (that's a whole other post), it was my dog that rode shotgun with me. When I would ride out into the Wyoming wilds on my horse alone, it was my dog that went with me. As I slept under the pines in the Big Horn Mountains, it was my dog that slept curled up next to me. 

I was devastated when I lost Bandit to a brain tumor when he was only 3 1/2 years old, and cried for weeks until Sage found me (that's a whole other post.) My dog, I discovered, was a deep part of my sense of security, since I lived alone and far from my parents and family. 

My dog, it turned out, was an integral part of who I am and what I do, right down to my daily routines. 

Bandit

Yet I found myself holding this adorable little guy and thinking, "I'm not sure I want a puppy..."

Most would assume the reason for this had to do with the fact that my dog, Sage, had been killed just a few days before in an accident.

The Sage Brush Pup

But it wasn't. 

You see, I have always been a little skeptical of married couples who go and get a puppy right after they get married. I always thought to myself when I heard about or read about this on Facebook, If they want a baby that bad, why don't they just have a baby? This was not the most gracious thing I have ever thought, but it's true. 

So a few months ago, I read another post on Facebook about a couple getting a puppy immediately following their nuptials, and thought to myself:

Ha! I so am not going to be part of a couple like that. Jon and I already have dogs, so there's no need to get another one for a few more years, when I'm ready to train a new cow dog.

I am sure the rest of that thought followed in smug tones of aren't I clever, la-di-da, and then I didn't give it much more thought. Sage and Brown (my dog and Jon's dog) were famous friends and playmates, and we were a happy little merging family of owner-canine pairs. 

Then Sage had a run-in with the neighbor's pickup about two weeks before the wedding. In defense of said neighbor, he felt awful and certainly wasn't being careless or doing anything intentionally, but Sage's head and the truck's bumper collided. Thankfully, it was not a messy or painful death. Sage just slipped away, laying down by the creek and never waking up.

I was very sad, as was Husband. 

It's always tough to lose a dog, but when you grow up around farming and ranching, you do learn that death is a part of life, and dogs don't always have the longest lifespans. This is not much of a comfort in the moment, but it is part of what I know and believe. Ultimately, it's what let me be open to getting another dog so soon. 

Even if it meant being "that couple."

So we took the puppy. We got married on a Friday and picked up the puppy that next week. We decided on Winchester as a name because Browning the our older dog's name, and we like guns. Husband and I also like word games and themes, so we entertained gun names. And Winchester (Win for short) just fit him.

So here we are, married for 3 weeks now, with a puppy in the house. And he is totally our baby. It's ridiculous how much we love, adore, fawn, and giggle over Winchester. I can only image that when we have a baby sometime in the future, it will be a similar experience of loving, adoring, fawning, and giggling, just on a larger scale and with less sleep involved.

In fact, we laid on the couch watching a movie last night--I leaning against Husband's chest and Winchester sleeping on mine.

A happy little family. 

Oy. 

We are so that couple.

;-)