HoneyMutt

Aiden has been wanting a dog since he was about two years old. He spent the better part of one whole winter pretending he was a dog, yip-yapping responses to questions asked by adults such as, "What would you like to drink with dinner?" Ans: "Yip! Yip!" or "Did you brush your teeth?" Ans: "Grrrrr..." At one point he had his whole school class barking and whining on all fours for several days and I think his teachers were ready to kill us. He finally lobbied Andy onto his side, and the two of them have been putting the squeeze on me for months now for being the lone hold-out. "See, even Haley wants a puppy!" they'd say when she crawled around chewing on the furniture.

Andy had been sending me photos of pups on Petfinder for weeks, andI was having none of it. Then finally, I allowed myself a small peek at the photos.... BAD idea! It wasn't long before I was picking my favorite pooches and plotting to visit shelter dogs. But it turned out adopting a mutt wasn't as easy as we thought it would be. Most shelters in our area advertise puppies that they don't actually have in their possession (they are all in the south somewhere, Alabama or Georgia) so you can't meet the dog in advance. Which wasn't OK with us. After several dead ends we finally found a shelter in VT that had a bunch of puppies actually in the state of VT... and conveniently enough, we were headed up to VT the next weekend.

At PuppyPalooza there were about 20 mutt pups, from 9 weeks old to about 6 months. Aiden immediately gravitated towards the tiny ones (what kid wouldn't I suppose), of which there were only 4. He asked to see a brown one and within a few minutes he'd made up his mind. THIS one. Would you like to see these other dogs over here too? Nope. How about that one over there? No. I'll see it but I want THIS one. And so we had our puppy.

Then on to the name! Aiden had always dreamed of calling his puppy either Scooby Doo or Fudrucker... both of which are distinctly masculine, but our puppy is a girl. It took a lot of effort but we managed to convince him that the puppy needed a different name... Aiden's vote was then for Daphne (the perky redhead in Scooby Doo... of course) but Andy and I were not sold. Over the holiday weekend, people threw out tons of potential names... Smudge, Dandelion, Chili Dog, Sandy... Aiden vetoed them all. It was looking like Daphne would prevail when someone suggested Kimball (the dirt road the camp at Lake Champlain is on). OK! said Aiden. Thank goodness.

So far Kimball (a.k.a. honeymutt, Kballs, or pup-pup) is a very chill puppy dog. She tolerates being passed from 4-year old to 4-year old like a little stuffed doll and then chases them all around when they run. She's had a few accidents in the house and chewed on a few things she shouldn't already, so we know she's going to be a typical puppy, but she seems very bright. We taught her how to sit in about 10 minutes and she'll do it anywhere you ask now (you mean i just have to put my hiney on the floor and i get a treat? No problem!). We're going to have fun with her.