Adventures in Mommyhood: Meet my Dog: Sookie

SOOKIE!!

Sookie is my first born daughter... with brown fur. She is a 2.5 year old lab mix (and we have been married for about a month less than we have had her). She has a great story on how she came to be in our family.

While I was in college, I took a companion animals class. In this class, we had to do so many hours of volunteer work. I volunteered at the Central Missouri Humane Society (CMHS) every Saturday. The last Saturday that I volunteered, there was a litter of puppies that I was able to go into the cage and play with. There were 9 puppies in the litter, and the shelter said that they were a Labrador and Yorkshire Terrier mix. Caleb and I had been talking about getting a dog when we got married and got to our first Army post, so I knew that getting a dog was something that Caleb was okay with. After playing with the puppies for a while, the CMHS staff kicked me out of the kennel saying that the puppies were only six weeks old and not eight weeks. So, I spent the rest of the day walking and playing with other dogs.

Right before it was time for me to leave, there were a few rescue groups that came to split up the litter. There was a mother and daughter that were a part of one rescue group, and I told the daughter that if they picked the dog that I wanted, I would adopt it. She agreed, and I picked out the dog that I wanted. Her name was Angela Lansbury. They also got a puppy from a different litter that day. (They were told by the CMHS staff that doing this would increase the probability of one or both of them becoming sick, and "Angela" already had kennel cough.) I was unable to take Sookie home with me because I was living in a place that did not allow pets, so I let the mother and daughter take her to their house but I could come visit whenever I wanted to.

I told Caleb what I had done. He was stunned that I had adopted a dog, but couldn't wait to meet her. We had to name her. We were texting that night and trying to figure out names. We were THISCLOSE to naming her Nova, but I thought that if we did that, whenever we said her name she would think that we were telling her "no." After texting a few more names, we decided on Sookie. Of course, he thought that it would be pronounced like Sookie on True Blood, but I thought that it would be pronounced like Sookie (Sue-key) on Gilmore Girls. Luckily, my pronunciation won because I had the dog nearby to visit. Haha!

The first week I had her!!

Playing while wearing her first collar.

Being sick with kennel cough mad her very sleepy.

After about a week and many visits to Sookie, I decided that I wanted to move her somewhere else. The house she was currently staying at was CRAZY! The daughter had three dogs of her own (on top of having the other puppy that they had taken that day), four cats, two little kids, and her husband was deployed. I asked my friend Miranda to take her. I think this was about two weeks until I was going to be married, so she would only have to keep Sookie for two weeks. She agreed to keep her, and that is where she stayed until I was ready to take her to Fort Riley.

Living the life at Miranda's now!

After coming to Fort Riley, I took her puppy classes, then obedience and advanced obedience classes, and finally agility and advanced agility classes. She is a S.T.A.R. Puppy and a Canine Good Citizen. She LOVES doing agility jumps. She also loves snow, running, taking walks, playing with her doggy friends, sleeping, and getting petted. And, even though she is now scared of wind (in Kansas that not very good), she has helped me through some of the toughest times I have been through: Caleb's deployment and my miscarriage. I'm so glad that she is in our family.