Meet Brody. Our 3 year old Black and Tan Coonhound mix. He was our first child :o) we rescued him as a 12 week old puppy from Last Chance Rescue approximately 2 weeks after we returned home from our honeymoon. He's been known as "the Brody-man" almost since day 1... and he's my baby. Jason gets up first during the week and is in charge of breakfast duty for him and his brother Bauer while I catch a few extra ZZZ's... when they're done - it's cuddle time! Brody-man always gets "Dad's" now vacant spot in the bed - and we cuddle and schnooze until its time for me to get in the shower (don't worry... Bauer gets lovin' too - nestled in between my legs). It's one of my favorite times of the day.
To say our little family has been through some major changes in the last 6 months to a year is nothing short of a huge understatement, and an event that took place at midnight on this Sunday night culminated in my true appreciation of this handsome puppy's undying good nature.
It was - as I said - midnight on Sunday night, and Jason and I were of course just finally getting into bed after a busy weekend of continuing to finish up the final stages of our home renovation. I was putting a clean pillow case on one of the 20 pillows I've come to sleep with during my pregnancy and Jason was already getting comfy in bed. Just as he rolls over to close his eyes, our bed makes a crunching sound. (Insert fat jokes here... lol - sorry babe.) Not good. I look under there and find all of the support legs running down the middle of our king size bed, laying on the floor not supporting anything... the middle of all the support beams sagging sadly - but thankfully not broken. So as Jason goes to find his drills, screws and a support beam to run up the middle of the bed next to the obviously flimsy legs, I grab the dog beds (located on the floor at the foot of the bed) and pull them - zonked out dogs and all - across the room to allow for our bed to become accessible for fixing. Jason comes back and starts drilling screws into supporting feet and beams etc. and little Bauer stirs and gets up, wondering if there's something he should be doing or some toy he could bring to us that would assist us in our bizarre night-time activities. But mid-project, Jason and I have to laugh. Brody is back to being SOUND asleep, his puppy barks and twitching feet the sign of an all too tantalizing dream (chasing squirrels I'm sure) that has yet to be interrupted by our noisy project.
It was then that I thought - I could learn a thing or two from this dog. In the last year, we've both experienced many of the same.... "hardships" - shall I say. Many of which I had no control of - but ALL of which he had absolutely ZERO control of. In the last year, Jason was gone for 9 months for work, during which time he would show up for just a couple days here and there over the weekends & try to get in as much qt time with us as possible. The rest of the time Brody and his brother Brock spent many long nice summer days cooped up inside while I worked full-time and ran errands to keep the household running etc, and then became inexplicably exhausted and cranky during the first part of my un-discovered first trimester. Then in early December... his brother and best-friend in the whole world just wasn't there one day (at least this must have been how it seemed to him). He looked for Brock for a solid week, constantly checking the last places Brock had laid, trying to track his scent to a place where he would find his missing friend. In honor of our beloved Brock - we wasted little time in adopting another dog in need of a new forever home... but again, Brody had little "say" in this decision, other than to be the good-natured animal he was and tolerate this new little squirt's almost constant need to play and follow him everywhere. Then mid-January, we decide to literally rip apart the only home he's ever known - taking several large living areas down to the studs, with all the noise, mess and chaos that entails. He and Bauer literally had our master bedroom and a back second bedroom to habituate in... and it was winter out, so no sunlight in the evening to allow for play sessions in the yard. Bauer knew little else with us, and before he came to us had been an apartment puppy - so he seemed to need little to no adjustment period. Brody.... seemed utterly and truly confused.
And yet with all of this going on around him, he continued and continues to be the wiggly, sweet-natured, well-behaved (most the time) dog he's always been. We get home after a long 10 hour work day and he doesn't look at us and say "Where the hell have you been - I'm hungry and I've been cooped up all day!?" Instead he's as happy and excited to see us as he was the first day we met him. It just all culminated for me the other night when I thought - geez if Jason had moved my bed and disrupted my sleep at midnight on a Sunday night, I would have been a flaming "B" to him!!! And over this last year, there have been times when I've been a whining, complaining, "B" to him and just about everyone else in my life because "I'm just so tired of all the chaos." And here's our Brody-man... in the midst of it all... still finding a way to chase the squirrels in his dreams and wake up in a good mood the next morning despite it all.
He is my hero... :o)
He is my hero... :o)
~ E
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