Author: Inkuria

At 8:30 am on Friday morning, Johan, Emil, Malena and myself set out to drive to Kennel Fridsborgs in Sweden to pick up Chaplin, our puppy-to-be. After a couple of delays on the way, we arrived a little past 3 pm, and met both Chaplin, Angelika (the breeder) and their respective families.

By 5 pm we had concluded our business, and set course for home with Chaplin. As you can see, he was alert at first, but soon settled down, and slept most of the way home. And in spite of all warnings and predictions, he did not pee or puke, nor complain in any way or anything in the car (nor anywhere else) during the long drive home. He simply waited patiently to see where we were taking him.

The drive home took longer than expected, partly because it was pitch-black with no street lights the last 100 km or so through Sweden, forcing me to drive slower than I would have otherwise, partly because getting through customs (oh yes, you have to pay tax when you import a puppy from Sweden to Norway), which normally is not too much of a problem with a puppy, took much longer than expected due to technical errors with the computer system.

We were finally home shortly before 1 am. Most of us felt knackered from the long drive, but Chaplin, once he had had some food and water, was fit for fight, and started playing with Emil and Malena – and with the Easter chicken which was one of the gifts Angelika had given us for him before we left.

 

Even a fighter gets tired though, and once Emil and Malena had gone to bed, and Chaplin had spent a few minutes running between the kitchen and living-room looking for them, he had no problem settling down to sleep in his new bed. I woke this morning at 7 am when he was crawling under our bed – but he (and I) went back to sleep for another two hours after a quick step outside. Since 9 am, he has been exploring, eating and playing and all the other things little puppies do – including, of course, sleeping.

To round of, let me say that I can only recommend Kennel Fridsborgs. The entire family clearly has a lot of love for their dogs, the puppies are taken really well care of, and Angelika had even been taking them for drives in her car, so that they would get used to driving before their new families came to pick them up. Angelika’s main demand for prospective owners, apart from the obvious fact that they must have a lot of love for the little new family members, is that they must be prepared for the time and responsibility that a puppy (and later the grown dog) will demand from them.

If you should happen to be looking for a Jack Russell terrier right now, Chaplin’s brother was still waiting to find a family of his own when we picked up Chaplin. You can find some lovely pics of him in Angelika’s blog.

I know we switched to summer time during the night, because it is almost 10 am, and our ten-year-old is still fast asleep. If we had switched to summertime next weekend instead, this never would have happened.

By the way, I think we will call him Chaplin; the eight-week-old who will be joining us next Friday, that is.

I grew up with three dogs – Bliff, an English Springer Spaniel, Bjørn, an Old English Sheepdog and a small mix called Gauga. Gauga was named after the battle at Gauga Mela, because she looked just like it, as her first owner told me when I received her as a gift. I was 7 years old at the time, Gauga was 3 years old and she became the center of my world for the rest of her life.

Later, after I had left home, I wanted to get a dog myself, and my then boyfriend and I found a lovely mix in a rescue center for dogs. She was 9 months old and black with white breast, but apart from the colouring and perhaps the shape of her tail, she had the looks and size of a Jack Russell Terrier – and I loved her to bits. I only had Gina for a year or two – she became a “child of divorce” when my boyfriend and I split up, and he insisted that he should keep her because I worked and was attending evening classes several nights a week at the time. Of course, he had a strong point, because dogs need attention and time, but I was heartbroken, because I did not even get visiting rights although she had been “my” dog. Need I say I missed her like crazy?

That was all many years ago though. I have often thought of getting another dog since then, and now, almost 20 years later, a new dog will be entering my life – and indeed the life of the entire family. Next Friday I (and probably one or two of the kids) will be driving to Kennel Fridsborgs in Sweden to pick up a Jack Russell puppy. He is simply adorable, as you can see from the picture, and I am sure he will keep us all busy.

He will be 8 weeks old then, and for now goes under his “official” name, which is Hugo Boss. We still need to find out what we will call him, but although a few ideas have been tabled, I think we will need to see him before we make our final decision. We certainly look very much forward to having him as part of our family.

My three sons all have blue innocent-looking eyes (and yes, blue eyes are at times deceiving). No wonder really, since both their father and I have blue eyes. His are a shade darker than mine, but nevertheless clearly blue – as you can see:

 

I always thought our sons had a nice mixture of our eyes. This is the 17-year-old:

 This is the 12-year-old:

 

 And this is the 15-year-old:

 Or so I thought – but yesterday, he suddenly looked like this:

 Woah! Had that green-eyed monster most of us hide inside suddenly taken full possession of him? Luckily not, but the optician had forgotten to tell us that the eyedrops she dripped in his eyes shortly before when he went for a check-up, was in fact a fluorescent dye. The dye makes it easier to spot any infections, but does not show clearly in artifical light. Hence I did not notice anything amiss until five minutes after we had left the shop and were sitting at a table by the window in a small café. We were chatting, and I looked at him to find him with these eerie eyes. It is a slightly creepy sensation when out of the blue, your blue-eyed kid appears to have turned into that green-eyed monster you have only spotted on a few occasions.