Our new houseguest...

Here's the newest little man staying at our house for a little while. He was from that rural shelter I went to a while back, and he had been hit by a car. The shelter has no vet on the premises, so he was kept in his kennel (with the quarantine dogs) for a week--the legal amount of time a dog needs to stay at the shelter before being put to sleep. In that time, he was not seen by a vet once and was just left in a kennel without any human interaction. As luck would have it, my friend and I showed up on the day he was scheduled to be euthanized, and I literally ran back into the shelter to grab him before leaving (he wouldn't walk so I had to pick him up :))... I already had 3 dogs, WAY over my limit, but something about this guy got to me! I just couldn't see a dog with a tail wag like his having his life cut short with such a depressing end. I was convinced I would have to euthanize him, but I told myself it was worth the sadness to give him a couple days knowing what being loved was like :)  

But he's ok-or he will be! He has a broken pelvis, and his back left leg is completely out of its socket--and on top of it all, he's heartworm positive.  He was coughing/sneezing a little and way too thin to go through the surgery right from the shelter, so we brought him home with lots of meds, and he's been eating super high calorie puppy food every day. I dropped him off yesterday, and he's having surgery on his leg in the morning (and getting neutered). And then in a couple of weeks, he'll have his heartworm treatment.  He has a looooong road ahead of him, and I couldn't justify keeping him in boarding through all that, and my sweet hubby agreed! Taylor agreed to have him as a foster before meeting him--so I think he was expecting to go through what we went through with Tubbs (where I had to sleep on the floor or on the couch with him while he coughed and hacked up all kinds of stuff from his pneumonia, and woke us up every thirty minutes with his barking for months... NO complaints...he was worth every second!) BUT then Taylor met this sweet, quiet little guy and he was in love with him by the first night! We tried calling him Griffey--but it just didn't fit... that's a tougher dog's name. So then we decided Nemo--you know how Nemo has the tiny fin on one side but doesn't let him stop him? It seemed like a good fit....but the girls at my vet said it was "not cool enough" for him. So we'll see. 

We've only had him a week, and we both missed him last night... which doesn't usually happen with the other wild and crazy Labs that come through here ;)  We're not committing to anything, but this sweet guy is welcome in our house as long as he needs to be here :)   He's tiny too--he weighs less than all the girls, but as you can see in the video, he's really underweight.. so he's just about 30 lbs right now, and Maggie's height.  SO cute!