News from Anita

After raising two big black lab boys, I wanted to try a little yellow lab girl so we put in our request to the Seeing Eye and in December 2006, Anita arrived at our home. She was tiny and she cried a lot -- I slept on the floor with her for the first few days and for the first month or so gave her a t-shirt of mine to sleep with to quiet her down in the middle of the night. She was a sweetie. I called her my petite puppy because she topped out at about 55 pounds while Lee called her the pooper scooper -- I'll let you figure out how she got that nickname.
We got a letter from The Seeing Eye on Friday -- Miss Anita is doing very well and we've been invited to her Town Walk. If all goes well, the Town Walk is the last time we will see her. We'll walk about a half block behind Anita and her trainer while Anita "struts her stuff". She won't even know we're there since we're not allowed to go near her so we just get to send her hugs from afar.
It's heart breaking to raise a puppy for someone else. We want to be proud parents and hope they graduate and go change the life of a sight impaired person forever but on the other hand, part of us hopes they will return to us. If they don't make it through school, we are offered the puppy back first and of course, we would take our pup back.
But as Ed says there is a bright side for Anita graduating -- now we have room for another puppy. People ask us all the time how can we do this, part with a puppy that we raised and loved for over a year -- I tell them I call it my "puppy trade-in program". But in reality it is very hard when our pups return to TSE. The best you can hope for is another little puppy to distract you from missing the one that just left.
We're hoping Anita's Town Walk will be within a week or two.