A Little Love Story

One of my daily rituals is reading my favorite blogs. I call it "my window on the world". Today, I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Tales and Tails, and was challenged to tell my story about how we picked out our first greyhound.

It just doesn't seem like it's possible that 8 years have gone by. This month on the 27th, we will celebrate our 8th gotcha day. My girls and I chose this adorable brindle boy named Tom Sawyer. A shy boy that was cat safe. That sounds perfect!

At that time we had an adoption rep in our area for GPA Indy since our chapter, GPA Tri-State, was just being formed. The timing was right and Tom was going to be the very first adoptee for this new chapter! After the application process was completed, we went to Lafayette, Indiana to pick up Mr. Tom.

Shy was one of the features we liked about this boy. When we went to the kennel to pick him up, we found out that shy didn't even come close to describing him. He wouldn't even come outside of his run to look at us. Finally, after no luck, we went inside to meet him. He ran around the room and wanted nothing to do with us. His owner was able to get a hold of him and bring him to me so I could pet him. My mind was made up, he was coming back with us. After all, the girls had picked him out.

Tom had been living in the kennel since it was deemed that he was not a good candidate for racing. He ran his 3 races and just didn't cut it. Lucky for him, his owner/breeder takes all of his dogs back to his kennel until they are adopted. For Tom, that was 18 months.

After a couple of weeks at his foster home, Tom was getting used to life on the inside. When he came to our house for the first night, he spent 16 hours in his kennel. Not by my choice, we left the door open. He was just so scared of everything. It broke my heart. We finally got him out by literally lifting the back of the kennel up so he kind of slid out.

Little by little, he made small strides. He started out spending most of his days at the bottom of the stairs. Within the week, he moved up to the landing. Then he made it into the living room. Slowly, but surely, he was gaining trust in us. It didn't take long though for us to decide that we needed to add the second dog. Along came my Dixie girl and she helped Tom blossom into the goofy boy he is today.

This picture was taken right after Dixie came home. Not only are we celebrating Tom's 8th anniversary of becoming a family member, the 21st would have been Dixie's 11th birthday.

So, there's a little bit of our story. Hope you enjoyed it.