Dog Blog

It’s a Girl!

We have a new addition to our family, a little puppy! She’s about 8 weeks old, and is a mixture of Chow Chow, Retriever, and Rotweiller (I know, we didn’t find out about the Rotweiller part until she arrived at our door!). Someone out on the main road breeds dogs, and he said he would just give her to us for free. We make sure to tell everyone here that she was a gift, because according to everyone we talk to, dogs like her cost over $100.00! (Even though she’s just a mutt). So our new puppy needed a new name. We decided that it needed to be either a name that had something to do with this country, or a name that reminded us of something we missed from home. So….we decided to call her Riesling. We miss our wine….a lot! I wanted her middle name to be Merlot, but that was maybe going a little overboard.

Since Riesling became part of our family (three weeks ago), life has not been the same. We have not had one uninterrupted night of sleep! She needs fed every three hours, she is not potty-trained (we keep lots of paper towels around for her little messes that she leaves us), and she’s teething right now. So yes, she is just like a small child!

She had some de-worming medicine right before she came to us, and we got to witness how effective that medicine was. A couple days later, I was cleaning out her little bed when I saw what I thought was a rubber band. I definitely didn’t want her choking on a rubber band, so I quickly picked it up with my fingers and threw it away. A few minutes later, I realized she had thrown up in her bed, and there were a million little “rubber bands” in the throw up! Upon closer inspection, I realized they were moving! Hmm………rubber bands don’t move. Nope, they were a bunch of little worms that had worked their way out of her system. For the next few days, we got to see worms everywhere, and I quickly took de-worming medicine for myself. I was fairly paranoid for the next week, wondering if I had worms crawling around in my stomach.

Riesling spent the first few days at school with us. The apartment had not yet been “puppy-proofed”. The students loved her! House pets are not very common here, and collars and leashes are pretty much non-existent. We get a lot of stares when we take her for walks with her little red and blue leash and red, studded collar. She’s kind of like our little celebrity dog. If only we had a little designer bag to carry her around in! Of course, she’ll soon be too big for a bag.