she's here! meet the new addition!

Cruel blog title, I know. And no, there's no baby yet. I'm 41 weeks, and there are starting to be some signs of coming labor. So! Believe you me, there'll be a sincere post or several when he or she makes their grand entrance.

Anyway, since the baby has been taking its sweet time, and since we've been planning to add a dog to the family at our earliest convenience, and since Jason has this precious window of vacation that he could be spending training a dog, we went for it. I think it's a neat full-circle sort of deal that we got this dog at the tail end of this pregnancy, and we had to put down our last one, Beth, in the first trimester of my pregnancy with Zoralee. 

So, who is this delicious goddess of a dog? you may wonder. She's a year old Lab/Shepherd mix from the Humane Society, and we have absolutely fallen for her. We visited her several times before taking her home, and she exhibited more and more of the traits Jason wanted in a family watch dog. We also visited dozens of others, but we kept coming back to Dotty, whose name we are transitioning to Kaladi. We couldn't see sticking with the name Dotty for the next decade but figured a rhyming name would be less confusing for her. Kaladi Brothers Coffee was the local roaster up in Anchorage, so it'll remind us of back home. Dotty Kaladi, as we currently call her, is as dark as the darkest, thickest coffee you could brew (just our style), and her eyes are a delicious brown, the way coffee looks after it has been properly doctored up with Sugar in the Raw and whipping cream. (Oh, yes we do use whipping cream.)

Dotty Kaladi is super duper smart and wants to please. She is sweet and licky, excitable like puppies are, but with a gentleness that reminds us a lot of Beth. Fully house-trained, doesn't chew - I mean, come on! She's a dream boat! We felt comfortable with her background; she was given up strictly due to her owner moving, not behavioral or health problems. Granted, we haven't let her totally roam free with the chickens or cat or baby Bennett yet - we're doing slow, gradual introductions with a long line leash - but she sleeps in our room quite contentedly and shows no aggression toward Zoralee or Molly the Schnauzer. Within a few days, she has caught on to heeling and several other commands, and she acts like we're her long lost family. It's fun being dog-owners again, and we're excited to see how many times she saves our lives from burning buildings and whatnot.