Like many kids, my daughter had been begging for a dog for years. Well, with two working parents and an empty house from 8-5:30 every day, there was a simple answer. However, after realizing that pandemic life was not going to end quickly, and my husband’s job moved him permanently home, the answer wasn’t so simple anymore. My daughter’s detailed PowerPoint presentations about how our family desperately needed a dog actually started having an impact on our point of view on getting a puppy.
Our family is a typical busy household with two working parents, young kids in school and sports, and between friends and family, it seems like there are constant visitors. Trying to imagine how a dog would fit in our already crazy life seemed overwhelming. Who would feed the dog, walk the dog, and play with the dog? Would my house be a safe place for a dog? Do our friends have allergies to dogs? The list went on and on.
As a promise (and an attempt to push off getting a dog) we got two hamsters for the girls. These things had to be far easier to take care of than a dog, and I thought it would help make the girls realize how much work an animal is. This didn’t go as planned. If anything, it completely backfired. The girls kept pointing out that the hamsters don’t compare to a dog and they just didn’t want to play with them as much. They really were not even that much work. My kids were happy to feed them and give them water but cleaning the cage was really more than they could handle so even if they offered, they knew I was going to have to do it myself. To make matters worse, one hamster has aggression issues and started eating the other one, so we had to get a separate cage to keep them safely apart. Now I was cleaning two smelly cages of rodents that I definitely didn’t want in my house, and we were no clearer on if a dog was a good idea for our family.
After 2.5 years of hamster life, we were finally hamster free. The girls were clear on how much they helped with the hamsters (weekly food checks hardly seemed like much to me, but that didn’t keep them from bragging). After the terrible hamster decision, we finally had a good idea that would actually help us figure out if a dog was going to be good for our family.
We decided to start by fostering dogs for a local organization that needed help. The girls learned quickly how much work a dog was. Our first few times were only a few days or a weekend, but then we had a german shepherd for 5 months. This dog stole our hearts. My girls would nap on the floor next to her, they would play endlessly with her, they would try to show her new tricks, at dinner they would tell me stories all about her day, and they would take endless pictures of her around the house. They didn’t provide much care for her, they couldn’t walk her without me, it was easier to feed her myself than constantly ask them if they fed her.
We learned exactly what life with a dog was like while we had her. If it was too much for us, we knew we only had a few months, so the commitment wasn’t as scary.
