Pet-sitting...

Oh well. With summer on the way, my husband is thinking of traveling. Gary is an amazing planner when it comes to visiting other cities and countries. We leave home with a 20 to 30 page itinerary of every sight worth seeing, every restaurant offering five-star meals, and a cozy B&B for each stop along the way. I repeat: Oh well.

My husband is already excited about the summer plans... he may have been a travel agent in a past life, or possibly an intrepid explorer in a distant past life.   My first question to my husband when he started talking about taking a trip was "And what would we do with Savannah?!"  Gary didn't understand why my first thought about traveling was not deciding where to go but what to do with our one-year-old puppy.

To me, Savannah is still very much a puppy. Judging by her behavior and personality, I think she will stay mostly a puppy for at least another six months, if not another full year.  And how do I leave this puppy in the house for a week or more and have just anyone coming in to feed her or walk her?  How will someone else know when she has to really go and when she's just playing around out in the grass?  And will another person sit with her when she's hungry but doesn't want to eat by herself in the kitchen? And will someone else let Savannah put her head on his/her lap when she just needs to be reassured with a hug?

About a month or so back, Gary and I visited a boarding kennel in the next town. We took Savannah with us, driving way into the godforsaken woods behind one of the main highways here, to a very tired-looking kennel that had not one blade of grass for the dogs to play on, and a big dungeon-esque room filled with large wire kennels where the dogs spent most of their days and all of their nights. We were told that we could bring Savannah's bed or blanket so she wouldn't have to sleep on the concrete. Well, let me tell you, I wouldn't have wanted to bring her bed into a kennel there because the floors didn't even look clean. And the noise.... just horrendous. How would Savannah sleep there when she's used to a quiet house? Both my husband and I agreed that we needed to take that particular boarding kennel off of our list.

There are other kennels in town, most of which are connected to veterinary offices. Savannah would have a kennel all to herself, with access to fenced-in grass outside so she could come and go at will, and she'd see the other dogs in the next-door kennels. There are two possible kennels that we could go and look at, one at our own vet's office, and the other at a vet's office that we weren't too fond of when we took our dog Gracie there. (They were all business, lacking good bedside-manners with our sick Gracie.)

One of our friends has offered to take care of Savannah for us if we go away, but that's an awful big commitment to make for a trip that would be more than just a long weekend. And even though Savannah is very comfortable with our friend, how comfortable would Savannah really be if she were left alone in this house all day and all night, with an hour's worth of company three times a day?

When we've gone away in the past, I've kept Sweet Pea in the TV room so he can't get into mischief in the kitchen and breakfast room.  Now that we have Savannah, Sweet Pea would be company for her, but can I trust Savannah at this young age to play nice all day with him when there's no one here to supervise all that play time?  Letting Savannah and Sweet Pea have the run of the TV room, kitchen, and breakfast room would be fine for an older, more mature dog, but Savannah is still so young, and not very mature at all.

So while my husband is excited about planning a trip, I'm already anxious about what to do with Savannah while we're traveling.  My husband says that he's not going to let a dog rule his life. Well. I can understand that to a point. I'm not wanting a dog to 'rule' my life either, but we are responsible for Savannah and for her safety and well-being, and that's just that.