New Puppy!!

I am hereby announcing the arrival of a teeny addition to our family. We finally have puppy # 2!

We have named her Storm (the first one is Rogue, now we have Storm - it's an X-Men theme) and she may well live up to that name. She is another Chi-weenie, that is, a Dachshund/Chihuahua mix. She will be smaller than Rogue since the daddy Chihuahua is about 4 pounds and mother Dachshund is about 12-13 pounds. We looked around at rescues from Alabama to Maine and ran into several snags along the way - most of which were that the places would only adopt out locally, that is, within 60 miles or so. We wanted another Dachshund mix, preferably another Chi-weenie, so I began searching Google for "breeders". It's not a purebred AKC style dog, but there are a few breeders of these out there. Not wanting topatronize a puppy mill type of situation, I picked one that is a farm, breeds a few kinds of dogs, doesn't produce tons of litters a year and has humane values for breeding and owning dogs. We chose THIS PLACE. They are very "crunchy" and really have a shelter-feel to them. The woman who sold us Storm was wonderful and nice and also, as it happens, hooked us up with another person from RI who was buying one of the Chi-weenies, so we coordinated the pick-up with them and didn't have to drive to Georgia to pick her up (although we were prepared to do so.) The breeder was not charging "premium" price for the puppies, which also reflected well on the breeder, I thought. They were $100.00 each. So with what we chipped in for pick-up, it was about the same as what we paid to adopt Rogue from rescue.

Without further ado, you can see Storm on the Flickr site!
She is under the 'New Puppy!' section that I made the other day.

She arrived at our house on Sunday, April 29th by way of my friend Wendy's house. The guys picking up their puppies arrived back in town much earlier than we had expected and we weren't home from a LARP event yet. So I arranged to have them drop off the tiny pup at Wendy's house, which is only 2 1/2 miles away from mine. So she had the little girl for a couple of hours and then we went to pick her up. She is the tiniest little puppy I have ever owned. The only other 8 week old puppy I had was Kya (the Malamute) and she was probably at least 10 pounds already at 8 weeks old. This little girl is only about 2 pounds. I havenothing to weigh her with and I don't want to put her on the scale at Petco yet until she has had all her vaccinations in a couple of months. I was telling my parents that she is honestly the size of a little kitten, big head and all. She was born on March 5th, so she is now 10 weeks old.

She and Rogue get along very well and have already grown fond of each other. There is some jealousy for attention on Rogue's part, having been the only spoiled puppy in the house until that day. But we think things are progressing well. Rogue is 17 pounds now, so she gets a little rough for the tiny one at times, stepping or chomping a little too hard. So they play for a while and then the "grrr"'s and the squeaks get a little loud and we pull them apart. But if early indications hold true, we think that Storm may just grow up to be agood contender for Rogue. As you will see from one of the pictures (titled, "Nganga!") she will growl and bark and bite back at Rogue when she gets in her face. We'll be working on controlling that type of play so that our house is not just a mess of broken furniture and destroyed floors and rugs when the little one is grown. It's funny, even though the jealousy is there, Rogue gets up in the morning, shakes her head and wakes up Storm, waiting for us to take her out so they can play. Also funny is that no matter what toy one of themhas, the other one wants it. I can put a toy in front of each one of them and they will play with it for 8.3 seconds before realizing, hey, that other pup has something WAY more interesting than this! and wandering over to get it. It is very cute. And, of course, she sleeps a LOT! She loves sleeping ON us, either high on the chest on the neck area, or in the crook of an arm. And of course, there is Rogue jealousy about this too, as she loves to nap on us as well. One of the reasons it took me so long to get this out is because I have spent several evenings after dinner with two pups nestled comfortably on my chest/belly with a blanket over them, watching TV on my computer screen. It's a productivity buster, for sure. But the insecure napping on mom and the rough play will pass and we will be able to leave them to their devices more as time passes, so we just need to weather this part (it's SO tough to weather having to pay so much attention to two cute pups!!)

So, please welcome Storm to our family, go see the pics to get some cuteness into your day and I hope you will get to meet both of them one of these days!