This Should Work

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Louisville to hand Otis over to his adoptive family. This is the hard part of agreeing to foster; Otis had been with us for two and half months and really started to feel like part of our family, but now it’s time for him to go to his permanent family.

My wife once said “Yoda may be the sweet one, and Spike may be the cute one, but Otis is the funny one.” And it’s true, he could always make you laugh either with his big smile and wall-eyed stare or doing something acrobatic like hurdling our other dogs on his way to his food.

Otis also wanted to be in the middle of everything. If it sounded like something was going on in the other room, one could hear Otis sprinting to find out what was happening. Here’s an example: Before we sent our other foster dog Charlie to another foster home, my wife wanted a picture of just her and Charlie on the couch. Just as I was about to take the picture, Otis came flying into the room and the picture ended up looking like this:

Yep, that Otis taking up a third of the frame with his mug. He jumped up at just the right time.

We did get a chance to meet the family who have three kids ages 4 to 13 and all of them seemed to smittened by him right away. The middle child wants Otis to sleep in his bed at night-which he’ll love- and their youngest daughter was hugging him so much that the mother kept telling her “gentle, gentle.”

The family’s in-laws also have a pug, so Otis will have a playmate to run around with; and the mother has a home business so Otis will be with her most of the day (not extensive hours in a crate).

It’s clear that Otis will get lots of love from this family, but our concern is also his health. He’s got some sort of allergy as well as a minor ear infection and pneumonia in the past. So we hope that they will follow up with the medications and research the allergy thing, but we no longer have control over that.

At home things are quieter; only two pairs of dog paws trot across the hardwood floors, there’s a little less barking a the squirrels and birds outside the window, and running and jumping on and off furniture has almost gone. And while we both enjoy the calm silence, we also miss our Mr. Otis.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS