Good Golly Miss Molly!

Lets take a minute to chat about ball of energy that will be gracing these pages probably more than you care about, but lets face it, she's just damn cute. Our little Molly girl.

 

We adopted her from N.O.A.H (Northwest Organization for Animal Help) up in Stanwood, WA in October 2011 for my birthday. She's a year and a half old red heeler, pit bull mix (among other things) and she's just a doll. I grew up with dogs and it was hard not coming home to one every day. Renting with a dog is insanely difficult if not impossible so waiting until we bought a house was the right choice for us. We had gone to Seattle Humane Society the weekend before and unfortunately didn't connect with any of the dogs there (Michael and I have different wants in dogs, I want basically anything that is excited to see me and needs a home whereas Michael wants as little fur as possible - read: no chow/husky dogs). We had looked on N.O.A.H's website and they had quite a few dogs that fit what we were both wanting. So we got up early on a Saturday and headed north.

When we first got her she was a skinny 40 pounds.

When we got there we looked around and noted the ones we wanted to meet and walk around with. A few of the ones we were initially interested in weren't going to be a good match because they were either not good with other dogs or weren't good with kids. Many of our friends and family members have dogs and one of our main goals was to be able to take our dog anywhere with us. We also have 3 nephews under the age of 9 so whatever dog we ended up with needed to be good with kids. The reason we wanted a dog that was closer to a year old was because with Michael and I both working full time we don't have the time or the dedication to be able to train a puppy and our hope was the basics of potty training etc wouldn't be a worry with an older dog.

Molly (then Jazzy) was the first we took out on a walk.  When we saw her in her room she was calmly laying curled up on her bed. That didn't last long. Walking with her she bounced around the path and pulled like crazy on the leash. Through it all Michael and I really liked her. We walked another dog (a border collie mix named Fergie - shelter dog's don't have the best names given to them) and just kept thinking of Molly. So we filled out the paperwork and took her home! Luckily Fergie found a home right after we walked her so it worked out perfectly :-).

We don't know a whole lot about her history, she's had puppies and we would have loved to be able to find them! And she came from a shelter in the Tri-Cities as a stray, which is highly unbelievable. All we can hope is she didn't have too terrible of a life before we got her, but she seems to be enjoying the one she's got now!

She's settled nicely into our life, and within a month developed separation anxiety. 6 pairs of my shoes (MY shoes, never touched Michael's) a few pens, a chapstick and a sharpie have become collateral damage. To help us with leash training her and working with her excitement levels we took her to Puppy Manners class run by Becky and Dave Bishop in Woodinville. Fantastic, fantasic program, I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a dog training class. They have a puppy class for dogs up to about 5 months old as well as a class for the "teenager" dogs which we took Molly to. It's worked wonders and really helped us understand how to work best with her.