New Blog....

At the urging of a few friends I've decided to start a blog to chronicle the trials and tribulations we go through with and for our dogs. As many of you may know, we do not have children and our two beloved Golden Retrievers, Casey and Sunny, in a way have become our kids. With their individual personalities and unconditional love they have transformed our lives to overflowing with joy and adoration.

When we first got together, we knew we wanted to get a dog, so we did what probably every new dog buyer does, we looked in the paper. Trying to be as responsible as we could, we then researched the different breeds and breeders in the area and settled on our first bundle of fur named Casey, a Golden Retriever. Casey was a really good and easy puppy. He was potty trained in two days and never cried in his crate at night. We were pretty lucky with our choice in our first dog. When Casey was about a year old, we noticed him getting sadder and sadder when we would leave to go to work in the mornings. He didn't want us to go, he wanted us to stay with him. We discussed this with our vet and she recommended that we get a friend to keep him company during the day while we were gone at work. At the time, a co-worker of mine was fostering a female Golden Retriever through a local Golden Rescue organization and asked me if we were interested in adopting her. Her name was Sunny and she was a four year old female. We decided to try an introduction between her and Casey to see if it would work out. Well a two week trial visit turned into 10 years. They were inseparable and fast became the light of our lives. In Spetember of this last year, Sunny started to slow down a little bit and we knew that she was probably not going to be with us much longer, since 14 years old is pretty old for a larger dog, especially a Golden. So we decided to look into adding another member to our furry family to help Casey (and who am I kidding??-US) through the loss of Sunny when the time came.

In October my friend Nancy invited me to go to Kanab, UT to visit Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Best Friends is the largest animal sanctuary in the country and is a "no kill" shelter to over 700 animals of all kinds, shapes and sizes. We volunteered at Best Friends on October 30, 2009. We volunteered to work in Dogtown in the "Old Friends" section. It was here that I met and fell in love with a Saint Bernard/Great Dane mix named Amos. After taking several dogs from the "Old Friends" section out for their morning walks we were asked by Joyce, one of the staff at Best Friends, if we would like to take one of the dogs out into town for some socialization and exposure to life outside the sanctuary. Nancy and I decided to take Amos for a stroll through town and to get some coffee. Well, needless to say, after about 30 minutes with him I was smitten and set on seeing if we could start the adoption process.... The only problem was how to break it to my husband who was 400 miles away that I was adding a rather large member to our furry family of two Golden Retrievers. One look at him and how could he say no?