SUYL: Pets

There was no way I could pass up a Show Us Your Life dedicated to PETS!!! As you well know, as a married-but-childless couple in our *ahem* mid-twenties (I can still say that, right?), our world frequently revolves around our fur baby, Lola. We adopted her in late September of 2008 and she was about 8 weeks old and of indeterminate breed. As the Humane Society we adopted her from put it, she was destined to be yet another Georgia Black Dog...apparently there's lots of these mutts running around! She stole our hearts (although we'd been planning to get a dog for quite awhile...she wasn't an impulse purchase or anything!) and we took her home and just prayed she wouldn't be too huge.



Here's the day we brought her home. Awww.....

Oh I'm sorry, is the cuteness making your heart explode?? Yeah, me too. Here's a few more for good measure.

This must have been a few weeks later...she's bigger. And her ears got more and more lopsided!!!

Last Christmas. She LOVED laying in front of the fire and hogging all the heat!!

At Watson Mill Bridge State Park in January. We take her on all of our family trips!

And here she is, fully grown, a few months ago, dragging me on my roller blades. :) Big dogs are useful for things like that. And thank God she never got that big...she tops out around 50 pounds. Fifty pounds of the softest, silkiest fur you have ever felt. Fifty pounds of pent up labrador-something jumping on you when you visit our house. She's very smart, but the not-jumping thing is really not her forte. Yet.

Obviously I could go on and on about Lola for days...but that's probably not necessary since nearly all of my blogs do include her in one way or another (I notice that the Lola category seems to have more posts than any other!). What you may not know about me is this: I have another pet. The red-headed stepchild, so to speak... (what an awful expression, by the way...)

Quite a few years ago (approximately 2003) my roommates-at-the-time and I adopted a pair of teeny baby kitties that had been abandoned at a local vet's office. We wanted a pet and when a friend who worked at the office told us about this boy-girl pair of siblings, we immediately fell in love with them and adopted them. I mean...look at these pics from their first few days in our lives. How could you NOT love them?!?

We named them Aidan (the orange one) and Nadia (the calico)...palindromes, you may note. They were the sweetest things. As the years went by and roommates moved in and out, it ended up that I was the one left with them. They spent the first 3 years of their lives living inside our townhouse, but when I moved in with a friend who was allergic to cats, they got a quick introduction to being outside cats. This worked out pretty well for Aidan (the orange boy), but after a year or so Nadia got adopted/kidnapped (a fine line there) by some neighbors who took a liking to her. I couldn't get too mad...they actually took her to the vet and let her sleep inside (even while she was still mine!), which is more than I can say for myself at that point. :)

This was probably in 2005 or so. They were the cutest pair ever.

So for the past 3 years or so it's been just Aidan, and he still lives outside. It took us almost a week to capture him after we moved this summer...he's very skittish and only came up to our porch in the early morning and evenings, so we had to keep going back until we got lucky and caught him!! After we moved him to our new house, he disappeared for a few weeks, but as he always seems to do, he found his way home eventually. He now lives in the lap of luxury on our front porch and flowerbeds and spends most of his days roaming the woods behind the house. He and Lola have a love-hate relationship fueled by curiosity on both of their parts, so they both spend most of their time on the look-out for one another (although Aidan never comes inside and Lola is never outside off a leash). A favorite pastime for both of them is for me to open the front door (leaving the glass storm-door shut and locked!) and let them stare/bark/hiss at each other for hours on end.

So that's my family. Matt, Erika, Lola, and Aidan. What is it with people naming their pets person-names, anyway? Obviously I fall into that category, but seriously. If you didn't know they were pets, you could easily think we had 2 kids!

Join in on the fun-- do a blog about your pets! It was very enjoyable to browse through millions of pictures trying to find the *just right* ones to post! I could probably actually make a coffee table book or something out of all the kitty/puppy pics I have...somehow we just don't take as many pics now that they're "grown." Baby animals (and humans) are just so much cuter!