New farmhouse puppy

We have a new puppy at the farmhouse!! While we are all very excited, it is a little bit of a happy/sad tale to tell and I have my daughters permission to share.

Late one evening in early February, our dog Bear bit our daughter in the face. While she is ok, she did have 17 stitches to put her lip back together. The plastic surgeon feels she will always have a scar, but we are doing everything we can to minimize that as much as possible. Our daughter is one of the strongest people I have ever met. Although she did absolutely nothing wrong and only went to kiss Bear on the head, when he snapped, she still felt in her heart it was her fault. We have reassured her many times that he had mental health issues and we had seen a few things that led us to be careful and to increase his training.

On the other side of that coin, our wonderful son, feels responsible because he played with him as a puppy a little rough. We have reassured him over and over that is is not his fault that Bear was just not right.

Hubby and I feel responsible because we feel we should have let him go when we first saw signs of him not being quite right. We truly felt that he was 95% amazing dog, but 5% not quite right. We felt in time, that that 5% would go away, unfortunately it did not. We consulted with the vet and even they couldn’t recommend re-homing him given what had happened. We had to say good-bye to Bear and start the healing process, both the physical and the emotional ones.

We promised the kiddos that there would be another dog in our life and it wouldn’t be too long. Just the right amount of time for everyone.

So, here we have…. well, he doesn’t have a name yet, but we have our new puppy. He is a border collie/Australian shepherd mix and so far a delight. It has been less than 24 hours, but he has adapted to his new family quite well and is already having me regret an upstairs office!

We love him and are looking forward to warmer weather and fun times outside!
He is super fluffy right now and loves to chase me and his tail, all around the living room. I will update with his name as soon as we figure that part out.