Bella

For those of you now wondering, we are getting a new puppy. (Bella) No, we are not crazy. Boomer is getting adopted this weekend. Bella came from a litter of stray puppies that were born on my friend's farm in Alabama. She is a border collie/lab mix. We are training her to be a therapy dog for when Tanker has to retire. After Tanker's last bout of 10 seizures in which he was in the ICU for a few days, we decided that it would be better to go ahead and get a new dog to start training in case the time comes that Tanker can no longer do therapy work. She will take a year to train and she will be able to certify once she is a year old. At that point, Wes will alternate between using Tanker for less strenuous things (read dog) and Bella for longer days (events and hospital). The advantage of getting Bella now is that she is young and she will learn from Topher and Tanker. She will take on a lot of their personality traits.

I was going to hold off on telling others about this, but we are really excited about little Bella. Hopefully we will be able to fly Bella up here within the next few weeks, or we can drive to Alabama to pick her up. Either way, between doing therapy dog work with Topher and Tanker, and training Bella to be a therapy dog, we are going to be very busy for the next year.

We named our new puppy, Bella, after our favorite place to go, Bella Cafe. Everyone at Bella Cafe is like family to us. They have been with us through the good and the bad. We hold everyone there very dear to our hearts.