It makes sense that I’d be won over by a piece of writing, but I didn’t imagine when I read Camille’s persuasive essay, “Why I should have my own pet,” that it would actually end with this little creature joining our family.
Her name is Star, she’s a 10 month old fox-like dog, and she has a fluffy feather of a tail that wiggles her entire body when she wags it.
So how did we get from there to here? 2 years ago when Camille laid out her arguments in her essay (for school — she always writes about animals), she actually had well thought out points such as her brothers each had their own pet and she should get that same chance, she wants to be a vet and work with animals someday and having her own pet would help her with animal experience, and she was already showing responsibility with caring for our current pets so she could be trusted to take care of one of her own. After reading through it and reluctantly agreeing that she did have persuasive points, I agreed that when one of our existing pets ceased to exist, then we would talk about getting “her own” pet. That was a shift from Josh’s position of “No more animals. They are a pain in the behind and create chaos in our lives.” (truth) So she gained a theoretical, someday maybe at that point.
She then went through a phase where she would talk about her prospective pet, always prefacing it morbidly with “When Micah or Zeki dies and I get my own pet, I want a small dog that I can hold.” Or, “I don’t want them to die, but if they did, could I get a little dog like Auntie Amy?” Um, no. I’m all for a smallish dog, but not a tiny one.
When she gets on a kick about something we usually have to tell her to stop pushing because she will get onto a thing and not let it go. Not in a rude, Veruca Salt, kind of way, but like a stream running over a rock, just wearing it down, little by little, until a groove appears and gradually deepens without even noticing it. It will come up in every conversation, she will try to pin down a time or a place or a date to make it more likely that it will happen, and she will attempt to advance her cause any time she sees an opening. Like an enemy taking ground, she slowly advances until I threaten to blast her back to her starting position.
So I don’t know if it was quarantine that made me soft or if another one of my boys leaving home broke my resolve, but at some point at the end of May/early June Camille was asking (again) if she could get her own little dog because Carter was leaving and I don’t even remember how it happened, but I do remember that she got me to maybe after Carter leaves we’ll look at fostering one . . . and she heard the magic word: maybe.
She saw the crack and dove through it and for the next 2 days I was getting texts at work of pictures of dogs on petfinder and links to shelters in Abu Dhabi.
It’s no doubt that she’s my girl because she researched the heck out of it just the way I would. But when she kept finding dogs in Canada or Mongolia, rather than local, I decided to give her a hand. Because I’m just that loving of a mom can’t keep my fingers off a research topic.
So I started following all the local dog adoption facebook pages — Dogs for Adoption in UAE, Stray Dog Center, Paw Patrol UAE, Animal Action UAE, Dogs in Abu Dhabi . . . and a few more. Because if a little information is good, then more is better, right? And there are a million dogs in this country that need homes. Unfortunately most of them are variations on Micah — saluki mixes that are bigger than we wanted, with a history of street living, resulting in potential separation anxiety issues. Having traveled down the Prozac road with one dog already, I was not looking to take that trip again.
I told Camille that we would look and be open, but that she would have to pray that God would provide the perfect dog for her because small dogs are few and far between here. So I looked every day, scrolling through hundreds of dog posts for just the right one to jump out at me.
In the end, there was only one possibility. I saw her and knew she was it. She was 9 – 10 months old so almost fully grown and only 25 lbs, was living with a foster mom for the past 3 months in an apartment so potty trained, had photos with little kids so not too skittish . . .
I messaged the foster right away and asked the important questions like “can she be left alone without freaking out?” and told her that we were very interested, but unfortunately, because of our city’s lockdown, we were stuck in Abu Dhabi and couldn’t go to Dubai to meet her. The foster and I hit it off and we messaged back and forth over the next several weeks waiting for the rules to change to allow us to leave Abu Dhabi.
And they did change — sometimes daily. Free to leave, but can’t come back to AD without a unobtainable permit. Free to go to Dubai, but you have to have a negative COVID test less than 48 hours old to cross the border. Free to go, but your COVID test has to be taken outside Abu Dhabi in order to count to return home (which meant a minimum of 1 or 2 night stay away while awaiting test results and risking a positive result away from home meaning you’d be stuck in a hotel in Dubai for 14 more days) . . . oh wait, that’s an unreasonable demand — fine, tests taken inside Abu Dhabi will count at the border checkpoint. Flip, flop. Flip, flop. All announced via the very official channel of Instagram at various hours late at night.
But it worked. Instead of it seeming unreasonable to pay $100 and get a brush stuck up my nose just to drive 1 hour away to pick up a dog, after the rule relaxed it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. So I hustled myself over to the drive through testing center where they very efficiently swabbed my brain cells and sent me the results by SMS the next morning. Then Camille and I were FREE TO GO GET HER DOG.
She must have been praying fiercely because it took an act of God for me to 1) Go get my nose probed 2) Drive to Dubai by myself 3) risk getting stuck on the wrong side of the border if they didn’t accept the results of my test. 4) try and find my way to a stranger’s apartment in the middle of downtown. Basically this trip hit all of my anxiety inducing targets — but when the day came I wasn’t nervous at all. And I only made 4 wrong turns in Dubai which is almost the same as going right there.
So for the past 4 days Josh and I have been playing full time dog managers — rotating dogs between rooms, getting them used to each others’ smells, walking the dogs together as much as possible, and trying to have them in the same room without reacting to each other. The dummies will walk beautifully together, but then bark and growl at each other inside the house and get each other worked up. Though as long as I’m feeding them bits of liver they’ll sit right next to each other and not even care that the other one is around. Each day it’s getting massively better so I’m hoping that soon we’ll be able to relax inside the house when they are together and not have to keep one or both of them on leashes or bribe them with food every 30 seconds to keep the peace. Just another quarantine project to pass the time.