A couple months ago, our household started looking into fostering dogs through the Waco Humane Society so Denali would have some company but without having to commit forever to the care of another dog. (i.e. if I ever move, I already have plenty of pets to have to deal with). However, once we got on the list to actually do the fostering, I learned that there really are two kinds of fosters; adult dogs that have some sort of special need (like needing to be housetrained, or having separation anxiety, or having some sort of medical issue), or puppies that are not old enough to have all of their vaccinations and therefore are not really suited for the shelter environment (basically, they are almost guaranteed to get sick with something fatal if they spend their whole puppyhood at the shelter because diseases like distemper and parvo are so common in our area and people bring their dogs to the humane society thinking they are an animal hospital or something which gets all the rest of the dogs sick).
Needless to say, with the lifestyle I have, I went the puppy route and while it’s been quite a bit of work, and a lot of time spent cleaning up, I have also really enjoyed it. There is something quite pleasing about hanging out with puppies. 
Also, I’m sure there is some misguided maternal affection that drives my interest in doing this at all – but for sure fostering dogs is a simpler process than fostering humans… we’ll see if I’m up for that (I do think I might be interested) in another chapter of my life.
First we cared for two little terrier mixes that were theoretically from the same litter, but you would have a hard time guessing that from how they looked. Someone suggested they might have different fathers….. We named them St. Ignatius (Iggy) and St. Clare. Cuties.
After those two got adopted by two nice families, we got a puppy that originally we thought might be a St. Bernard mix, but she’s just not growing fast enough to be preparing to be such a big dog. Katie named her Lindy after the dance…. she’s been a very easy puppy, which makes me think she might be older than I thought orginally. I guess it’s hard to tell and no one has a good guess these days on her breed, so she’s a mystery. Still available for adoption!
And *then*, I guess because I’m a sucker, I took three young Aussie puppies home with me on Thursday. Since I just got back from a trip to San Francisco (I should blog about that, too), we named
them after neighborhoods/streets in the bay area.
Marina:
And sweet little shy Delores:
And of course, there’s still my big puppy Denali, who gets more and more sweet and cuddly as she gets older. I’ve been waking up to find her on my bed snuggled up against me the last few nights. Usually it’s a bit earlier than I’d like to be up, but it’s not a bad way to wake up if it has to happen, I guess.
I think once these four puppies find their forever homes, I'll take a break for a bit. There's a changing of the housemates in late May/early June and I'm traveling some for the summer....one can only handle so much chaos at once. (or so they say).