Let me tell you a little about Ruby.
In April of 2005, my husband Greg came home from work and told me about a stray pitbull that he had played with that day while on break from work. The girl who lived next to Greg’s place of employment had taken her in, after a friend of hers decided he couldn’t care for her. Her name was Alizé (yes, Alizé) and, according to Greg, she was about 4 months old and very sweet and playful. I wasn’t sure why he was telling me about Alizé, as we already had a perfectly fine dog named Doozer and a finely perfect cat named Penny. Apparently, Greg’s friend’s apartment was too small and she was looking for someone to adopt Alizé. Well, good luck with that one, I thought, and went on with my day.
Here was our pet situation in April of 2005.
Notice its perfection:
Notice its perfection:
Two animals totally fine without any other animals present.
Over the next week or so Greg continued to play with Alizé at work (seriously, was he not required to actually work at his job?) and would come home and tell me about it.
Oh, Alizé is sooo sweet! She gives kisses all over my face! He would say.
Wonderful! I was wondering what that smell was. Is how I would react.
So, today, Alizé sat when I asked her to, and she took a treat so gently! He would gush.
Good for Alizé. I would return.
And on and on it went. And then one day Greg came home and surprised me with his daily Alizé news:
I told my friend that maybe we would keep Alizé, and she’s bringing her over here in an hour to see how it goes! OK??!!
" "
I'm going to tell you that I reacted in a perfectly sane, quite respectful manner, and you can choose to believe me or not. Completely up to you. You see, we already had a dog, Doozer, and he was huge! He was lovable and snuggly and produced copious amounts of saliva! He was all the dog that I needed. See:
Yes, I am that person who puts shirts on their dogs.
Furthermore, we had a
Please don't force me to pee in another animal's water bowl.
And neither did I! Especially a pitbull!
Greg! I shrieked, Pitbulls are bad! They eat cats and bite people’s faces off! Even when you think they are your friend and let them sleep in bed with you, you will wake up with one less limb! We cannot get a pitbull!
About an hour later, Alizé showed up. And, meh, she was cute, I guess. She had a sort of cute nose.
And, kind of a cute face.
And, you know, she wasn’t acting like she was ready to eat my face off, but I could tell she was thinking about it.
And, oh man, she just made herself at home, plopping her butt down on our couch, wrapping herself in our blankets, rubbing up against us, getting comfy, and breathing her sweet little smelly puppy breath in our faces.
Is this not enough blankets? Perhaps I should crochet you an additional afghan?
So, I fell for her.
We ALL fell for her.
Mom and Ruby
Dad and Ruby
Including Penny. But, please, shhh. Don't tell anyone.
And we changed her name to Ruby. For two reasons. One, Alizé? Really? I mean, I guess it’s nice if that’s YOUR dog’s name, but, I wasn’t very fond of it. And we couldn’t shorten it to Ally because that was the name of the dog that belonged to very good friends of ours. Two-I wanted to name a future daughter Ruby, and, since I didn’t have any human children at the time, I figured I use the name for my dog-child. Ruby ended up being 6 months old and small for a pitbull. The vet suspected she was the runt of her litter. So, just like our other animals, her birthday was sometime in October.
It’s been 5 years since Ruby came into our lives. Doozer is no longer with us, and we’ve since added an actual human child, Leah. Ruby, however, never really thought she was a dog, so to her, we now have two kids and a cat. We love Ruby very much, especially since Doozer’s death taught us to not take our pets for granted. Everybody loves her and enjoys her company immensely.
Uh, most of the time.
The Fabulous Ruby
1 comment:
This is the greatest! Pets are just fluffy family members!
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