Grown Up Life: bringing home baby!

i've been bursting with excitement for the past two months and its been an agonizingly long wait to make this announcement! today, jonathan and i brought home our little fuzzy bundle of joy...owen!

we've been keeping it under wraps for a long time, so now i've got to go back and tell you all about our little owen and how we came to adopt him as our family member! (i've been using a lot of exclamation points...can you tell i'm excited?!!!)

it all started on a west coast beach around sunset, the day before thanksgiving. jonathan and i spent thanskgiving out west in oregon with jessica and brandon. we spent the day driving up the oregon coast, checking out different beaches, including canon beach. it seemed that everyone on that beach had a dog, and one little dog caught mine and jonathan's eye. it was a 10 month old havanese. yea, i had never heard of one either. but it was love at first sight for me!

a bit of a history lesson follows. if you're not interested in history, skip to the next paragraph :)

this is the information i've gathered about the breed...i'm not sure how well i'll do with accuracy, but you'll get the jist. the havanese breed is from, you guessed it, cuba. back in the day, the upper class families of havana loved these little dogs and they were definitely a status symbol. the havanese could not be bought from a breeder...they could only be given as gifts to the very wealthy. people loved them because of their friendly nature, compatibility with children, their clownishness, and their desire to always please. they are "non-shedding", tyically from 8-12 pounds, and come in all sorts of colors. but as the american influence in cuba grew, the cubans began to prefer popular american breeds instead. with different political upheavals, some of the elite cuban families were exiled and they fled to florida. the breed almost became extinct until, in the 1970s, a breeder from colorado took interest in the breed and was able to gather havanese from different parts of the country and begin reviving them. they were adopted into the akc in 1997 or so. there are only about 4000 havanese in the US. thats a good summary.

so after our trip to oregon, a little seed was planted in the back of my mind. after christmas, i began looking around the state for local breeders and researching more about the dogs. and what luck! i found a breeder who was within 10 miles of us. we got in touch with the breeder and she had just had a litter of two girls and three boys...born january 17!

two of the puppies had already been reserved when we signed up on the waiting list. those were "red male with blaze" and "red female with solid face". jonathan wanted a male, so we were deciding between the black and the champagne one. the breeder was out of town for a few weeks, so we couldn't visit the puppies. we then got another update from her:

all the breeders come up with litter themes and assign the puppies temporary names. their theme was "our favorite jeans". puppies are so cute! anyway, at 6 weeks, we finally got to visit the puppies and, of course, i took about a hundred pictures. at that point, one of the families that got to choose before us hadn't decided which puppy they wanted yet, so we went to visit both "levi" and "calvin". its funny, because we were actually considering both of those names. in the visit, i had a strong gravitation to "levi". he enjoyed posing for the camera most.

This was the most adorable row of pictures...he wakes up from a curled up ball...

turns himself over onto his back...

i rub his little belly...

he falls asleep...precious!

and then his brothers and sisters smother him because, obviously, he's got too much room :)

and then we said goodbye for two more weeks. as you can see from the pictures, by the time we left we decided that "levi" would be our first pick. the family who was supposed to select before us were supposed to visit the next day...which was the day everyone had that blizzard. we were waiting on pins and needles hoping we'd get little "levi", but trying to stay positive if we ended up with "calvin".

about a week later, the family still hadn't visited, but in an email, the breeder told us that they were "pretty sure" they wanted "calvin". for us, "pretty sure" wasn't satisfying because that obviously leaves some wiggle room for them to change their mind. that made last week the longest week ever! in the meantime, we had a nametag made and picked out the name "owen".

we got the apartment all puppy proofed...taped up wires, created blockades, picked up chewables. i joined a forum online for havanese owners to try to gather up as much puppy info i could find. i was fortunate to find that there is another havanese owner down the road a couple miles...another great thing because, as i said before, they're not very common. the forum has been great and has tons of owners all over the country on there with advice and tips with everything from training to grooming to picture sharing! its great.

so this morning jonathan got up and went to work for a few hours. we went to pick up owen around 1 pm and spend over an hour with the breeder getting helpful tips and information from her. owen is such a sweetie! he cried the whole way home and wasn't easy to settle over the 20 minute car ride, but once we got him home, he was wagging his tail and playing with us.

i tried to get tons of pictures, yet again, but he's just so fast and my camera isn't the greatest with poor lighting and action shots! after about two hours of constant play, his little puppy body got worn out and he fell asleep on my lap :). after awhile, i got up and put him in his crate to sleep...and i figured i'd get this up while he's down for a bit!