puppy love

Monday evening! My favorite time of day during the week. I thought I would introduce you, dear reader, to the love of my life (second only to the Mister). His name is Sueño. He is two and a half in doggie years, which makes him a teenager in people years. He is adorable.

Sway, as we call him, came to us by accident. We had just moved back to the Windy City from a two-year stint in California, where we worked six days a week to pay the bills and had little time for each other, let alone a four-legged furball.

It was a Saturday in January. The first Saturday morning we had spent together in literally two years. We decided to do some light shopping and ended up near a brand-new shelter…so we stopped in. Sway was the last little puppy left of a six-dog litter found in an abandoned building in November. He was irresistible. The rest, as they say, is history.

At the time, we were living in a loft on the eighth-floor of an old industrial warehouse. The eighth-floor. With a puppy. In the dead of our first Chicago winter in years. You can figure out how the next few months went.

We learned to carry him in the elevator after he peed four times in one day on the way down for a potty-break. He was like a newborn human, waking every single morning at three a.m. crying to be let outside. He tore up the carpet in our bedroom, ate everything in sight and cost us hundreds at the vet for one small blemish on his leg. New parent-syndrome.

Ah, memories. This little guy is now fully potty trained with a big backyard to play around in and a very walkable neighborhood at his paw-tips. He is extremely over-protective of his mama and even though we socialized him at dog parks and beaches for the first year and a half of his life, he developed some alpha-dog psychoses and now humps every canine in sight. His other nickname is the Sheriff, for how he gets up from a dead slumber the minute my husband and I lay down for bed and walks around the perimeter of the apartment to check all the doors. That’s my Sway. He is very pleased to meet you.