Interwebs, meet Eisley…

Thanks for all the congrats and cheers for our new pup, Eisley. We are pretty much smitten with her. And I hope she feels the same way about us. I thought I’d pop in and fill everyone in on the story of this little girl since it was a bit out of the blue that we announced her adoption on twitter.

Nate and I had been thinking about adopting a rescue dog for about a year now, but our old condo had very strict rules against canines of any kind, so we had to wait. When we moved into our new place, and all the restrictions were lifted, we started to get excited about the possibility of adding a pup to our household but couldn’t really decide when we wanted to do it or if we should wait till after our wedding in October (since we’ll be skipping town for a few weeks). The other day, as we made a wrong turn (which, in retrospect, turned out to be the right turn) we found ourselves staring right into the SPCA property. Nate looked at me and said, “Do you want to go look?”

So we went inside and found two little black pups we liked. Bella was the first one we asked to see. She was tagged as a “lab mix” which everyone knows means very little in the world of rescue dogs. From the looks of her, she was mixed with something small like a Shiba Inu, maybe some Chow, and maybe a Pointer. She had a tiny head and was covered with shiny black fur except for some of her toes which were pure white. She instantly bolted after a lizard. Nate and I sat down with the volunteer as she told us what little backstory they knew for Bella. She was, they guessed, 6 months old. Her previous owners dropped her off at the SPCA after having her for 3 months. They had a 3 year old child whom Bella was very good with. Bella sniffed around at our feet and then sat down right in the center. Nate and I looked at each other and knew… she had a mellow energy, something that was a key trait that we were looking for and a rare trait in a puppy.

After about 10 minutes we decided not to see any other dogs and to take Bella home.  About 30 minutes later Bella became Eisley. She fell asleep in the car. And only peed in our house once. She already knew “Sit” and “Give me your paw.” Within a 24 hours she was responding to the name “Eisley” and coming to me when I called for her. She is fairly quirky, as are most rescue dogs I suspect, which is why we gave her a quirky name. She likes to snap her jaws when she wants you to play with her and she has the girliest bark I’ve ever heard from a dog. She also has some anxiety issues with tall men that we are having to work through with her but she’s already fallen in love with Nate (as long as he’s sitting or crouched down).

She also thinks it’s amusing to run away from me whenever I’m holding a camera, so I haven’t gotten very many photos of her yet. But, here’s a few. She’s about 35 pounds and they estimate she won’t get bigger than 5o pounds because of her small frame. Of course, we don’t know anything for sure. But we do know that she’s ridiculously mellow and well behaved, and because of that we got to skip the whole awful potty training-chewing on shoes-running away young puppy stage that most dog owners have to go through. Hallelujah!