My 8-year-old, Jacob, was asking Santa for a puppy. Just a puppy .. well, and a Nerf Stryfe gun, he decided after visiting his best friend, who owned one.
We'd had two dogs previously, with very different experiences.
Lucia was a lovable if clingy Golden Retriever who'd developed a protective streak when I was pregnant with Jake, and had once pulled a chair literally out from under my pregnant self to dash after a dog walking down our sidewalk.
Lucia became Jake's best friend, sleeping beside his crib and, later, running around with him in our backyard.
When my 4-year-old, Ollie, was a baby, Lucia would sit with him in the grass, taking stick after stick he extended in his chubby hands.
After Lucia passed away in 2013 of cancer, we tried and failed to adopt a youngish Golden. Finally, I found a fluffy tan and white border collie/Lab mix at a nearby rescue.
Long story short, our training and patience failed to curb Bear's aggression (his name turned out to be fitting, I suppose) and we had to find a new home for him after a year.
So when Jacob asked Santa for a puppy - a girl Golden with an "L" name, he said, deciding on the name Lemon, I was worried about the cost and extra work, but also excited. A little fluff ball of a puppy, sitting under the tree with a red ribbon around its neck! It was what I'd always wanted myself!
Santa answered Jake's letter, if a bit early, with a puppy he delivered the night of December 7th. She was adorable and sweet - "the perfect puppy," I told friends. Unlike Bear, she wasn't hyper at all. She napped a lot - a friend joked that she "wanted whatever Lemon was on."
We discovered, after her first two nights at the local emergency vet hooked to an IV, there was a reason she was that mellow: she had puppy strangles, a rare disease we'd never heard of (I'm an expert now; ask me anything). The Sunday after she'd arrived at our home, a yellow discharge was coming from her eyes, she didn't want to eat, the bumps I'd noticed forming below her mouth were bigger and her mellowness had turned into full-on lethargy.
(She'd also arrived at our house with fleas and a bacterial skin infection - it wasn't Santa's fault - nor, obviously, was it ours.)
We'd quickly taken care of the fleas (a late-night bath in Dawn, followed by a pill the next day) and she went on antibiotics for the skin infection, but strangles was another matter. She spent a total of three nights at the animal hospital, racking up a more-than-$300 vet bill and being put on steroids for four-six weeks.
While she remains on the steroids, our Lemon is still a version of "the perfect puppy" - if not quite so mellow. Well, okay, the nipping will hopefully stop soon, but I suppose, as someone told me, "They don't call 'em 'land sharks' for nothing!"
Both boys, along with my husband and I, love to come home to her wiggling body and that funny little doggy smile she does when she sees us.
The boys and I often give her a voice, making her say the funniest things, many of which we got from a hilarious video based on the dog from the movie "Up."
(Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_C5zsPmuXE)
When I envisioned Santa bringing my boys a Christmas puppy, I certainly didn't imagine all of this happening in the first weeks of owning her.
But, it seems few things ever go as planned. And watching Jacob rush in to see Lemon when he gets home from school, or hearing Ollie say as he crouches down near her, "You can tell me anything, Lemmy-girl!", using one of the 20,000 nicknames we lovingly call her - well, that's more like what I imagined.
