Three Dog Life

So, I have three dogs. They are all three years old. The first one is Small Dog. She is mine. I picked her out on PetFinder.com and then tricked my husband Jon into letting me adopt her. By "tricked," I mean I said "I'm going to get a puppy" and he said "Oh cool." We went up to meet her at her foster mom's and it was love at first sight. On my part. She was much more in love with her foster mom and her foster mom's dog.

Big Dog came next. We got him because Small Dog was bored. This time I tricked Jon by saying "Hey, I'm just running down to the animal shelter to look around, okay?" He said "You're planning on getting another dog, aren't you?" and I said "No. Of course not. But you should come with me and bring Small Dog too because the people at the shelter want to introduce Small Dog to the dog I picked out. Also, you have to co-sign the forms." And he said "Oh cool." So we took Small Dog to the shelter and introduced her to the dog I picked out. Small Dog and the dog I picked out hated each others' guts. The shelter said taking the dog I picked out home would be a bad idea and promised to find her a different home with no Small Dogs that hated her. Then the kid, who has inherited some of my fine dog-getting skills, announced he'd gone and picked out a different dog for us to take home. This was Big Dog. But then, Big Dog was a teeny, tiny dog. Small Dog loved him. We took the little tiny dog home with us. Then he grew. And grew. And grew into a huge, sweet, clumsy Big Dog. Big Dog is Jon's.

Medium Dog showed up in the front yard. Me and the kid were out gardening. The kid suddenly said "Hey Mom, look at me!" I looked. He had his arms around Medium Dog. "Can we keep him?" he said. "Huh, can we? Can we?" "Ummm," I answered.

Medium Dog was skinny. He was limping. He was hungry. He had skin problems. Medium Dog had apparently been running loose in the neighborhood for awhile. Jon wasn't home, so I brought Medium Dog inside and tried to figure out how to convince Jon that we'd always had three dogs. So, Jon comes home and finds Medium Dog in the kitchen. He's not fooled by my attempts to pass Medium Dog off as a heretofore undiscovered feature of our house -- like the cans and cans of tomatoes we'd found hidden in the storage shed (or the liquor in the secret hiding place in the closet, but that's a story for another day). "The kid found him," I said finally, cleverly trying to share the blame. "Oh cool," Jon said. And so Medium Dog became the kid's dog.