Tallula

We just adopted a new miniature dachshund named, Tallula (or Lula for short). A lady at Helen's school had to give Tallula away and we volunteered to take her. She's 2 and 1/2 years old. Her coloring is called "dapple".

Before we had kids our pets were everything to us. Our 2 labs and our cat often slept with us in our big king bed. But once we had kids, everything changed. The pets were constantly annoying us to the point that there was definitely no more sleeping in the bed. We've been joking for years about looking forward to becoming "pet free". We even coined the phrase "Pet Free in 2003" as a hopeful wish for that year.

Over Christmas we got closer to the "pet free" goal when we had to put our black lab, Bailey, down. Although we made light of becoming "pet free" - when it became apparent that we would have to put Bailey down, we were all heartbroken.

We've always favored big dogs ("real dogs" as opposed to "shit dogs"), but we've always had a soft spot for dachshunds for some reason. We recently met a lady at one of my tennis matches who had the cutest little miniature dachshund and we thought that we could do a little mini dachshund - but later, after the kids had grown and moved out.

Then Helen got the email about Tallula. She forwarded the email to me at work and I replied that I didn't know what was going on, but for some reason I thought we could do it. A couple other people replied before us, but Tallula didn't work out for them, so we got her. Derek and Adam just love her. She's very sweet. Helen and I even agreed that having Tallula around has made us more accepting of our lab, Madison, who's got a lot of irritating quirks.