Our Christmas Surprise

Have you heard about National Mill Dog Rescue?  They are an incredible organization that rescues Dogs from puppy mills.  You can visit their website here.  Please do.  They are always looking for new homes for the dogs they rescue.

Our love story with NMDR began last December.

We had a German Shepherd named Han who needed someone other than Kitty to play with:

We decided to go look for another GSD.  We picked out the names before we picked the dog.  If we found a girl we liked we would call her Princess Leia and if we found a boy, his name would be Chewbacca.

We fell in love with this girl:

We brought Princess Leia home and she was instantly the darling of the family.  

Kitty and I were happy to add another girl to our ranks!  The poor girl was so scared we had to spend a lot of our time with her just letting her get used to us being in the same room.  You see, she had been treated very poorly at the puppy mill she came from.  They treat dogs like livestock there and she had never been outside of her 4X6 cement cell her entire 2 years of her life...except to be mated.

And then...IT happened.  We took her back to the kennel to get spayed.  We dropped her off and went about our day.  I was in the middle of lunch with my dear friend Julie when I got a call.  I let it go to voicemail.  And then I checked my voicemail.  The message went something like this:

"Uh, hello Jen.  This is Theresa from National Mill Dog Rescue.  Uhm...we have a problem.  We can't spay Leia today.  She has a belly full of babies and is due any day now.  She will have 3, maybe 4 pups in 3-7 days.  Will you please give me a call?"

Well.  Uhm.  Excuse me, but did you examine the right dog?  You see, Leia was so emaciated when they got her they couldn't fix her right away.  She was still excrutiatingly skinny when we got her.  I mean, we could see every. bone. in her body.  There was NO WAY she was carrying babies that were due in 3-7 days!

The folks at NMDR were amazing!  They explained everything we could expect before, during and after the birth.  They gave us everything we would need to help Leia.  We had all the support we could need to help us through this big surprise.  They even offered to take her back if we didn't want to go through all this.  Of course we told them no!  She was a member of our family now and we would help her through it.

We got the whelping area set up, we put down some blankets and we sat back to wait 3-7 days for the 3 or 4 pups to arrive.

HA!  2 days later:

Yep - count 'em.  There are 6!  All. Boys.

Mama was amazing.  She was so gentle with the new babies and had no complications during birth.  She did exactly what she was supposed to do.  Thank goodness!  It was a pretty easy job for my first "Mid Woof" experience.  I will admit I was a little freaked out when she went into labor and had her first one with me the only one home.  

Funny, we had no idea that when we brought Leia home, she was bring Chewbacca with her.  And Darth Vader, and Yoda, and Skywalker, and Jaba, and Obi Won.

We fostered the dear babies until they were 8 weeks old and were able to be adopted out.  Again, NMDR was wonderful.  The handled all the applicants and all we did was pick who the babies went home with.  That was a little tough.  Especially on our youngest son.  He wanted to keep them all.

We decided to keep one of the babies - we kept Vader:

He was justly named.  

We have been a family of 3 boys, 3 GSDs and a cat for a while now.  Life settled into a chaotic routine.  The puppy wakes me up by jumping on me every. morning. an hour and a half before the alarm clock goes off.  Han happily lets him do the dirty work and then barges in for his morning ear scratch.  Leia is still very skittish but she shows how excited she is when I come downstairs by hopping around like a deer and making little squeaky noises.  

I wouldn't trade her for anything.