by Megan Rix
I phoned Ian. “Babes, I’ve got the puppy. She’s a little girl and her name’s Emma, but we need some more things for her from the pet shop.”
I gave him a list of items to pick up on his way home, then carefully measured out exactly the amount of food she was supposed to have and poured it into her bowl. She sniffed at it but didn’t eat any, although she did have a few sips of water before curling up and going to sleep.
Emma was awake and full of life by the time Ian came home.
“Hello, little puppy girl,” he said, kneeling down in his best work suit so he could pet her. “Welcome to your new home.”
She snuggled into him and I felt a lump in my throat. She was so perfect and so tiny.
“What have I got for you?” Ian said, and pulled a name tag, a soft blanket and a cushion bed from the pet-shop bags. “They said they could tell I was a new dad!” he said, sounding slightly miffed as he opened the third bag of presents and treats for Emma. “Look—they even had puppy milk.”
Emma immediately pounced on a brown dog toy that was almost the same size as her and started to play fight with it while making little puppy squeaks. The dog squeaked back and she sat down fast, shocked. A few hours later Ian brought the crate in from the car and carried it up the stairs. It was time for bed. Jamie had warned us we probably wouldn’t get much sleep during the first few weeks, but I didn’t care. We had our puppy—who cared about sleep?
“Night night, Emma,” we said, and put her in her crate at the foot of our bed. She was curled up on the small piece of blanket with the scent of her mum on it.
That night we slept with our heads at the foot of the bed so we could be as near as possible to her.
“She’ll probably cry during the first night,” Jamie had said. “But don’t worry. It’s a big thing for a tiny puppy. It’ll be the first night she hasn’t spent with her mum and her brothers and sisters.”
But Emma didn’t cry. She curled up and went to sleep. I tried to sleep too, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to miss hearing her if she needed me, so I listened to her tiny breathing as she slept.
An hour or so later she woke up and gave a whimper.
“It’s all right, Emma,” I said. “It’s OK.”
I lifted her little warm body out of the crate and hurried downstairs, padding past the Christmas tree and its winking multicolored lights in the corner. We’d only just got out the back door when she did her business.
I looked up at the sky, standing in my dressing gown and overcoat underneath the frosty stars. Emma followed me on a little trip of discovery around our garden before I sat down on our arbor seat, tucked into the bushes, and lifted her onto my lap. No need to rush back to bed just yet. She snuggled into me and I undid my coat, placed her inside and did the zip up, so she peeked out like a baby kangaroo. Pretty soon she fell asleep. I looked down and knew our decision to become puppy parents had been a very good one. I was already totally in love with her.
I felt a cold spot on my face and then another. It was snowing. Just lightly. Probably not enough to settle.
“We’re very pleased you’ve come to live with us,” I whispered.
4
Christmas Day with a puppy was like none I’d experienced before. For starters, it began much, much earlier. Barely was it daylight than the alarm had already gone and I’d trooped out into the garden so that Emma could do her business on her frosty toilet area. I’d gone back to bed in the hope of catching a few more Christmas winks and a snuggle with Ian, but she was yapping, jumping and eager for fun at the bottom of the stairs. She was full of the joys of only being eight weeks in this world, and, although she didn’t know Christmas from any other day, even a normal day dramatically extended her experience of the world and held plenty of surprises and adventures. She trotted behind me as I got her breakfast ready: two-thirds of a bowl of Helper Dogs’ food, one-third of the food she’d been eating at her breeder’s. She loved her food, but even as a little puppy girl she was very ladylike, eating it delicately rather than wolfing it down as fast as she could as some puppies do.
Later, we’d wiped the sleep from our eyes and restored our equanimity with a small glass of bubbly, and thus our small family gathered around the tree together for the first time.
“Open this one,” Ian said, handing me a present.
Inside was a small cuddly smiling Labrador toy.
“I didn’t think we’d have Emma yet,” Ian said sheepishly.
The toy Lab caught Emma’s eye right away, and she began jumping and begging to play with it. Surely Ian must have bought it for her? As far as she was concerned, all nice things to play with in the world were hers.
“Can I?” I said.
“If you want to. It came from the pet shop.”
Emma already had quite a collection—her small toy box was overflowing—but we couldn’t resist giving her more.
“Here you are,” I said, after checking it didn’t have any parts that might be bitten off and swallowed by a rambunctious pup. Fortunately, its eyes were made of material rather than plastic buttons. It was cute but didn’t look that robust. In Emma’s current exuberant form, I gave it about three days. I had already been busy performing emergency surgery on a couple of toys who’d come into the sewing ER, covered in dribble and spilling their insides out after a particularly enthusiastic mauling.
Soon enough, though, Emma abandoned the Lab—whom we christened Spiky, after a peculiar tuft of hair on his brow—and turned her attention to the wrapping paper. She mainly liked the tearing sound, and attacking it as it drifted to the floor and collected in flurries around the sofa.
Sometimes I was shocked at how much I loved her already and how protective I was. It was an anxious love too—especially on Boxing Day when I thought I’d lost her. I left the room to answer the phone and then ran upstairs to check something on the computer. When I came back down, she was nowhere to be seen, and the toy Lab was looking lonesome and forlorn on the floor.
“Emma?” I said. She wasn’t in the living room. I hurried into the kitchen. She wasn’t there either, but the back door was open a crack. I went outside, scanned the garden quickly, but she wasn’t there either, and I started to panic, really panic. I felt sick, and a lump rose in my throat that made it hard to breathe. She was so lovely; it wasn’t hard to believe that someone would have wanted to take her and who else would be wandering around on Boxing Day except somebody bad? She was so tiny, so vulnerable, so trusting—what if she was lost? Cold and afraid.
There was a small gap in the hedge. Small enough for a tiny puppy to squeeze through if she was determined, and Emma could be very determined when she chose to be.
I ran next door and asked them to look in their back garden. No Emma there, and their back gate was shut, so she couldn’t have escaped that way even if she had made it through the hedge.
I was almost crying by the time Ian walked in.
“I’ve lost Emma,” I said. But I hadn’t.
“Look,” he said, and there she was, fast asleep, hidden among and dwarfed by her many toys piled in the corner.
I burst into tears of relief. So much for “the sensible route”—fostering a puppy rather than having one of our own. I was already far more attached than I’d thought could be possible.
Soon into the new year, Jack Frost dumped snow all over the East Midlands countryside, and Helper Dog classes were canceled. So, with phone assistance from Jamie and Frank, I began to teach Emma at home.
“How’s it going today?” Jamie asked as he picked up the phone to another daily briefing from me.
“Great,” I told him, and filled him in on this and that.
“They can be a handful,” he said.
I looked down at Emma. I was more than happy to have my hands full with her.
“Make sure you fill in her progress chart and hopefully this snow will clear soon. Any problems give me a call.”
Emma was so eager to learn, and my heart melted as I watched her work out
what she was supposed to do and tried to do it. I taught her commands for “sit,” “down” and “roll over” (but only on the carpet as I didn’t want her rolling over on the shiny new—but hard—laminate floor). Jamie advised leaving her collar on at all times so she would just accept wearing it without becoming stressed.
The one thing I wasn’t supposed to teach her was how to climb stairs. A little puppy’s joints are easily damaged by overstretching, but sometimes a puppy’s need to explore takes over, and one day I came out of the kitchen to find her two steps up. Then, the following day, she was five steps toward the sky and attempting the next when I caught her. At the sound of my tutting, however, she stopped and sat there, and it took me a moment to realize that the intrepid puppy, so keen to go up, hadn’t the first clue about how to get down again—except by looking plaintive and being lifted down by Mum. As soon as he could, Ian bought a stair gate. Another few pounds to the DIY store; I felt they should be rolling the red carpet out next time we went.
Jamie had explained to me how the puppies were monitored for their suitability for differently abled partners. If the dog has strong joints, it could go to people who needed tasks doing where the dog had to stand on its hind legs a lot. He introduced me to Denise, a lady confined to a wheelchair with limited mobility in her arms, and her dog, Yogi.
“He’d been so well trained that he fitted in with us straightaway,” she said, “and ever since the first day I brought him home he’s been turning the lights on and off for me. Sometimes if it’s cloudy he does it without asking!” She smiled at the recollection. “He also presses the button at the pedestrian crossing, no problem. Before, I had to wait until someone came along and ask them to do it for me. Strangers in the street are always amazed when he does it. It makes me laugh to see their shocked faces. I laugh a lot more now I have him with me. He’s so funny.”
Yogi put his head on Denise’s lap and she stroked him fondly.
Never mind the stairs, Emma still had a long way to go in all aspects of her training. She and I picked our way through the snowy garden—and, when it was blizzarding, around the living room—so that she would become habituated to being on the lead and resist the temptation to chew it. Plus there was the continual toilet training on the bark-chip area. She was pretty much toilet-trained within a week of arriving with us, apart from the odd accident, of course. Often, though, these were my fault for not taking her outside when she was most likely in need. Emma loved the beautiful snowy garden, though I only let her out for short stretches of time as I didn’t want her to get too cold.
Helper Dogs insists that puppies are only given one minute’s walk for each week of their life, so at eight weeks Emma could have an eight-minute walk—but not on the road or the park or anywhere that a dog who hadn’t been vaccinated might have been. We had to keep her under virtual puppy house arrest until she was old enough to have her second round of inoculations. I loved the little puppy-dog sounds she made as she ran across the snowy garden or “talked” to Spiky, who was almost her equal in size. Toys were pounced on with delight and dragged through the snow, and always, as tiny puppies do, she needed to be within a few feet of me. If I moved across the garden, she’d be there next to me in a flash.
When we could, too, we carried her out in a little bag so that she could experience as much of what the world had to offer as possible even before her second vaccination. Cue trips to the supermarket, frosty walks by the river and a bottom-numbing half an hour sitting near one of the local main roads, so that she’d get used to the sound of traffic and become habituated to huge trucks and lorries barreling past—after all, there’s no way except experience for a puppy to know that drivers have also been trained, and that they won’t mow down passersby. All Helper Dogs must be taught to sit at each curb and wait to be told to cross the road. They also (depending on the needs of the person they’re placed with) may be taught to press the button at a pelican crossing to stop the traffic, like Yogi, the dog we’d met who helps Denise. Whenever we left the house, people wanted to say hello to Emma—she was impossible to resist—and she was pleased to have the attention.
Every now and then, I wondered if her mum was missing her. I thought she must be, so I rang the breeders to find out more about Emma’s first family. They were very pleased to learn that she’d arrived safely and was eating well.
“Guide Dogs for the Blind have always taken all of the puppies before, but this year they couldn’t use them all. We’ve never had two puppies go to Helper Dogs before,” they said. “And she’s such a dainty little thing. We’ll send you some photos of her mum and the other puppies in the litter.”
I reassured them that Ian and I would love and take care of her, and promised to keep in touch and let them know how Emma was progressing.
Finally the snow cleared and Emma and I were able to attend our first Helper Dogs class. There were oohs and begs of can I have a cuddle from Stacey and Kate, the two dog groomers who had a salon adjacent to the training center. Emma happily obliged.
“She’s just the sweetest thing.”
I smiled my agreement.
“Ouch!”
Oh yes, she’d just started doing that. Emma had found her teeth and they could be like little needles.
Emma was overjoyed to see Eddie, her brother. Liz, Eddie’s puppy parent, told me that Eddie was also chewing like crazy. Jamie gave us all teething toys.
“Try to distract them with a toy,” he said. “It’s a stage they all go through, but you don’t want them damaging your stuff.”
“Or us!” said Jo. She was the third puppy parent to receive a Christmas puppy. Hers was a black Labrador called Elvis who seemed to like nothing more than sleeping in his crate. Eddie, Elvis and Emma. All so named because of their age: Helper Dogs, like many assistance-dogs charities, found it easier for quick reference to name dogs of the same intake with the same letter.
“He just loves his bed,” Jo said. “He wakes up in the morning around nine . . .”
Liz and I exchanged a look: sleeping till nine sounded like total luxury.
“. . . and then he has his breakfast and a little play and he goes back to bed for an hour—or maybe a little longer. He just takes himself off to sleep. That’s when I get my housework done or go grocery shopping.”
My eyebrows had almost shot off the top of my head by this juncture. There hadn’t been much sleeping—let alone housework—going on in our house, and Ian was picking up ready-meals every night on his way home from work. We didn’t want to leave Emma by herself for a second.
“She has to learn to be alone at some point,” said a woman in the corner who hadn’t spoken before.
“This is Diane,” Jamie said. “She’s an experienced puppy parent visiting today from the Peterborough center.” Diane had a Labradoodle that was sitting rigidly to attention beside her.
“It’s like being a parent,” Diane said. She looked over at Liz. “Do you have children?”
“Yes.”
“How about you?” She looked over at Jo.
“Grown up now,” Jo said. “I’m a granny.”
“How about you?” Diane said to me. “Do you have children?”
I hesitated, for fear of stumbling over my words, but Diane didn’t wait for my reply. “When you’re a parent, you develop a sixth sense of when your kids are up to something. Suddenly you seem to have eyes in the back of your head.”
“Hear, hear,” laughed Liz. “I need to with my lot.”
“And that’s why people who’ve had children make the best puppy parents,” Diane announced.
I concentrated on Emma, who was pawing my leg, so Diane wouldn’t notice she’d upset me. I might not have had the experience of having children, but I was going to be the very best puppy parent I could be.
“You OK, Megan?” Jamie asked when Diane left shortly afterward.
“Oh, fine,” I said, sighing. But I was worried about leaving Emma when I went for my monthly blood test and scan. Sometimes, if th
ere were a lot of people waiting, it could take ages for me to be seen. And, despite what Diane said, I wasn’t ready to lock Emma up in the house on her own for hours.
“Pop her around to me,” Jo said. “I’m only up the road from you, and she and Elvis can have a play together.”
“It’ll be at least every month,” I said. “Maybe twice a month sometimes.”
“Not a problem at all.”
Now that Diane had gone back to Peterborough, I was starting to enjoy the Helper Dogs class and the new friends I was making.
5
Puppies, it was turning out, were a bit of a full-time job. Even without the dozens of trips to the garden in every twenty-four-hour period, there were bundles of forms to fill in, charts to plot, diaries to keep. I felt as if I needed a secretary to keep on top of the admin, while I got on with the important business of loving and caring for Emma. And then there was our first visit to the vet.
Emma had been given her first vaccination before we got her, and she was due a second at ten weeks. Together, the two puppy inoculations protected against some real nasties including canine distemper, viral hepatitis, parvovirus, leptospirosis and other diseases that sounded like you wouldn’t wish them on your worst enemy. Even a quick glance at the list of potential symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, deep hacking coughs, fever, collapse and sometimes death—was almost enough to convince me never to let Emma out of the house without a biohazard suit on. Parvovirus, in particular, I’d heard a lot about as Jamie had been muttering darkly about an outbreak of “parvo” in our area; because of the vaccinations it wasn’t very common, so when a dog did catch it the outlook was bad. Puppies, naturally, were particularly vulnerable, and could die within a couple of days due to fluid loss. On top of the vaccinations, Emma would need to be wormed every month for the first six months, but it would be Jamie and Helper Dogs that provided the tablets. Dogs shouldn’t have worms for their own health, but the worms’ larvae also posed a health risk to people, and young children and babies in particular.