Newest Member of Our Family

I will be the first to admit that I am not a dog person. In fact, I am not really an animal person at all. I just don't like the licking, the smell, the poop to clean up, the responsibility (what do you do with the animal when you go on vacation), the claws, the jumping, and (for me) the list goes on and on.

So, you can imagine how I felt when a stray puppy decided to make our back porch her new home. For about a week, we didn't feed it (hoping she would eventually find her way back home for food) and tried to keep the kids from playing with it, while I called the Humane Society, Animal Control, and all the local vets to see if anyone was looking for a lost dog (or could take one in). Dad and Addison Marshall walked up and down our street, knocking on neighbors' doors, to see if anyone knew who she belonged to. All of these efforts yielded nothing, nada, zip. This combined with the fact that the dog had no collar, led us to believe that no one was looking for her.

Now we were faced with the decision of what to do. The kids had lost two pets a couple of weeks before, a fire-bellied toad named Fango, and a lizard Dad and Marshall had caught in the yard and caged, named Mr. Lizard, and the kids regularly enjoyed playing with the dogs available for adoption at PetSmart on the weekends. And even before this dog showed up, Marshall had been asking me for "another pet frog, a lizard, or..........maybe a puppy?".

So....at this point you can probably figure out how this story ends. Mommy melted, Daddy and Marshall cheered, Jack squealed and our family spent an obsence amount of money to have the dog spayed and given shots while we were on vacation.

When we got home, we let Marshall have the honor of naming her. After reviewing a list of female Disney character names we found on the internet, he decided to name her Meg, after the black-haired heroine in the Hercules book and she is the newest member of our family.