14 April 2009

Puppy Love

For many years we have asked that the fates would align and we would be able to get a dog. For many years we hoped and researched, wished and planned. Finally the fates have done their thing, the hoping and wishing has paid off (and the puppy bait worked!) Soon we will bring home the newest member of our family. He will be an adorable, little, fuzzy Elkhound puppy! We have put in many hours trying to find the right breeder and waiting for puppies to be born. At long last, we have finally found a little friend to call our own!


The puppies were born on March 8. We have visited twice, once at 3 weeks and again at 4 weeks. Each week it gets harder and harder to leave without our little guy (though to be sure he has been too small up to this point!) I have been keeping busy getting everything ready! My mom laughs and wonders what I will be like when we decide to have kids. (I told her I will have nine long months to keep myself busy!) We wanted to make sure that everything would be ready for when he came home, and that it would be the best system we could set up (since we are not living in our own house right now!) So we spent several weeks collecting the best deals on the items we knew we needed, setting it up just right and now I am in creative mode.


We decided to kind of stick to a theme. Since our little fellow is a Norwegian Elkhound (they are actually meant to hunt moose) we are going to stick to a snow/moose theme. With this in mind, I started looking at the leftover fabric mom had recently gifted me (she wanted to get it out of her house.) I found a rather large chunk of blue something or other and some really cute plaid (plaid and moose look great together.) With that I was off to a great start. First, I whipped out a really great kennel cover out of the blue fabric. Well, okay we had a lot of really weird problems with it - but in the end I really like it and it looks really keen! I really think our puppy will like how cozy it makes his kennel feel. Next, I stumbled upon a small amount of blue vinyl. When the brain got working, it decided a dish mat was in order. So I grabbed a little shelf liner at the store (to keep the mat from sliding across the floor) and whipped that up into a spiffy little dish mat edged in the cute plaid I had found. (Note to all the sewing people out there - using tissue paper with the no-slip shelf liner is a must. Really quickly I found out that it will not move through a sewing machine at all. But with a little tissue - success!) Next up: to make a "go bye-bye" tote bag and a toy bag for the house. One out of the matching blue and the other out of the cute plaid! Our pooch will be styling for sure!

I have been taking pictures of my progress on what has been called "the puppy nursery." I will add pictures to my posts as often as possible. I am also planning to put up some of my dog accessories on my etsy site. So if you are a dog lover like me - you should check my site to see what I have come up with to enhance the dog loving experience!