New Addition

After contemplating for a long time if we wanted to get another dog or not, we found Nestle and the decision was made for us :) I am still depressed and missing Carmel, and I think I always will be. I couldn't decide if I was ready for another dog or not, but kind of just started looking to see what was out there. We decided that if we were to get another dog it would have to be older and house broken already because I wasn't in the mood to deal with house training a puppy with the kids being so little - I didn't think my patience was where it would have needed to be :) So we started looking... I ran across this dog on petfinder and thought she was gorgeous - and looked like a girl version of Carmel. She was 1 year old, a leonberger/golder retriever mix, and '100 pounds of pure love'. I emailed about her right away to see if we could meet her and the lady responded that her foster family had actually fallen in love with her and were trying to adopt her. I looked for another couple of days, not finding anything, and decided to stop looking for the time being. 2 weeks later I got an email that the foster family could not keep her because their landlord said no, so she was still available. Then started the LONG process of getting her to us. She was about 4 1/2 hours away and there was no way we could take the kids on a 9 hour driving day to go meet her, or even pick her up. We started looking into staying the night in a hotel and trying to figure out a day that would work. In the end we were able to pass her through several different hands that got her from them to us, and without even meeting her we went to Denver to pick her up. Actually her name was Grace when we got her, we changed it to Nestle. She LOVES Snickers, is wonderful with the kids, very nice to the cats, and just a sweetheart all around. The first days were actually really hard because she reminded me a lot of Carmel and it mostly made me sad and miss him even more, but as we've gotten to know her better her unique personality is shining through :) She is definitely a puppy still, and I'm finding it's a lot harder to train a 100 pound puppy than the 15 pound puppies Carmel and Snickers were. I'm happy that she's finally in a forever home since she was passed around for the first year of her life. She's been a great addition to the family!