gracie, the pup | indiana county, pa photographer | personal

Meet Gracie, the newest addition to our family! She hangs out with me in the studio during the day and I can’t WAIT for Mallory to meet her! You see, Mallory is away at camp with my parents until Sunday, so she has NO IDEA that we have a new puppy! She’s been begging and pleading with us to get her a puppy and we’ve been waiting until the time was right and until we found the right kind of breed for us. She’s a Bischon a.k.a. a fluffy cotton ball. We’ve had her for a few days now and as with any new pet, it’s quite an adjustment. It’s nice to have a companion in the studio and it’s nice to be reminded that it’s time to take a break when she wants to play while biting my feet! 🙂

It’s not that I’ve never owned a dog before, we had them growing up and many years ago we had a Yorkie named Gizmo. We tried to adopt a chocolate lab earlier in the year and although Mallory loved her dearly, we found that she was allergic to her and it wasn’t going to work out . Ever since then, Mallory has been heart broken and begged us to get another dog. Here’s where things get tricky. We WANT Mallory to grow up with a dog (just like we did) but we didn’t want to rush out and just pick out any dog to replace the other one. We wanted to do some research on the right kind of dog for our life style and our family. It takes time to find the dog for your needs. Some dog breeds have more of a history of health concerns, after all, and whilst they can be treated and controlled (like with https://cbddoghealth.com/cbd-for-pancreatitis/, to name one example), We stumbled across the Bischon puppies from a girl that Greg knew from his childhood back home. Turns out she breeds them, he knew her -so we could trust that the pups were coming from a reputable breeder and after doing our homework we decided that it was the right time to add on to the family!

So off we went to Ohio to pick up Gracie.

Here’s Gracie with her HUMAN birth parents and her sisters…. haha (I’m a dork, I know!)

We pulled over along the side of the toll booth (they drove to meet us half way) and out pops three female fluff balls. We had our pick of the three females she had left. Because they all looked so much alike, they had color coded the tips of their tails. Immediately the black tipped puppy came over to greet us. After about 1/2 hour of watching them play the black one just kept coming over so THAT is how we chose. She basically chose us! She told us later that, Gracie was the calmest out of the three………BINGO! 🙂

If you weren’t as lucky as we were, and the puppy who chose you is a little furball of chaos, using a calming dog bed might help them relax and be a bit more manageable.

She was kind of sad on the way home 🙁

And as for the name, Mallory has a little white battery operated dog that she calls Gracie. She plays with it ALL the time and recently the batteries went dead in it (or someone took them out on purpose, I’ll never tell). We’re thinking about putting the “live Gracie” into the dog holder and telling her we replaced the batteries. Tee he he!

Mallory will be away until the weekend so Greg and I are plotting on how we are going to surprise her. The ideas are running through our heads. We still have a few days to decide……so if you have any ideas, leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear them!!