I Heroically Saved a Puppy from Certain Death (and Other Sordid Tales of Puppy Smuggling) –

We accidentally have puppies again. Lots of them! Pixie never has just one or two puppies. She gave birth to eight this time, and as always, my kids love every single one of them. We were not supposed to have puppies again though. If I let my kids have a dog, they promised they were going to take it to be fixed. That was a couple of litters ago.

I’m not really a dog person which doesn’t mean I’m a cat person. I only like animals that can go on my plate. I can’t see paying to feed and keep animals that don’t provide some sort of useful product (food, wool, milk). It’s just not practical to maintain an animal as a pet only. It’s a drain on financial resources. Even though it’s a relatively small expense, it is an expense, none the less.

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But my husband and the kids like dogs, so we have dogs. Part of the deal was they were supposed to take care of them in every way, and they are great about feeding them. They are not great about making an appointment with the vet to get them fixed and then taking them to the appointment. This might be a very calculated negligence of their responsibility because they really like having puppies here.

Since it’s been incredibly easy to find good homes for these super cute puppies, none of us have ever learned our lesson. With the litter before this which was quite a while ago, people actually fought over the puppies. I posted Free Puppies on a local Facebook rummage site, and within hours people were private messaging me trying to get me to go out of order to let them take a puppy first. It was insane. I didn’t even post these ones, and they’ve all been spoken for already.

The First Incident of Puppy Smuggling

Part of why this litter was spoken for early is because of the first incident of puppy smuggling. I was about to leave our driveway to go over to the school for my son’s back-to-school Open House one evening, and my adult, married daughter (the one who was married in high school and is now in college) decided she and her husband wanted to go as well. I thought it was a little odd that they wanted to attend the Open House, since my son didn’t even really want me to go to the Open House. He’s almost 17 and insisted Open House is only for the parents of little kids.

I should have realized they were up to something when my oldest daughter asked me to wait on them. Come to find out, my son-in-law had a puppy in the front pocket of his hoodie. It was in the 80’s then, so I probably should have questioned the hoodie anyway, but I’m always cold, so it’s feasible to me that someone might wear a hoodie on a hot summer evening. However, hoodies should not make barking noises, and this one did.

One tricky part about married teenagers is that they think they don’t have to listen to me, so my son-in-law brought the puppy into the Open House. By that time, it was pretty much stuck in the hoodie pocket, and they had a difficult time getting it free anyway. I told them they better not let any adults see the dog in the school, but remember how my son-in-law completely disregarded my No Stuffed Toy Rule when I told him there were absolutely NO GIANT TEDDY BEARS allowed at our house? (If you missed that story, you can find it in the It’s Not About Valentine’s Day post.) Well, he disregarded the No Puppies in the School Rule too.

Since a whole lot of children saw the smuggled puppy that he was supposed to keep hidden at the Open House, lots and lots of kids begged their parents to let them have a puppy. Consequently, these puppies had good homes lined up very quickly which brings me to the heroic tale of how I saved one puppies life.

“Bring the Puppy to the School Today!”

My middle daughter had a dentist appointment in the afternoon the other day, and as soon as we got into the waiting room, I had a text from my son asking if I could bring a particular puppy to the school when I dropped his sister off for volleyball. I told him we were at the dentist, and I wasn’t sure we would have time to run back home to pick up a puppy. He continued to text me several times wanting to know if I could bring the puppy. This was remarkable considering I didn’t even realize he was capable of texting actual sentences. He had previously only ever texted Yes, No, or Okay whether or not that was a reply that made actual sense. Normally, I could text him three paragraphs including six questions, and the only reply would be, “Okay.”

Throughout the time we were at the dentist, his messages became more and more frantic, insisting I need to bring the puppy for his friend Carl (not his real name). It was probably just the pure shock that my son could, in fact, type additional words that caused me to have a momentary lapse in judgement. We called my husband on the way out of the dentist and asked him to gather up the puppy and have it waiting for us because we only had time to pull in the driveway, get the puppy, and get to the school in time for volleyball practice.

During the seven minute drive to the school, the puppy peed twice. Fortunately, it was in a cardboard box on my daughter’s lap.

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At the school, my son met us on the front sidewalk to tell me we were too late. Carl already had to leave on the bus. What?! He was going to take the puppy on the bus? I asked my son how on earth they thought he was going to get the puppy on the bus, and he said, “He was going to put it in his backpack.”

I had assumed Carl was being picked up by someone which was why my son was so insistent I needed to bring the puppy that day. This was a bad assumption.

I asked my son what I was supposed to do with the puppy because I didn’t really want to put it back in my van. He said he would just keep the puppy at cross country with him, and then it would ride home in his truck. Did I mention I made the puppy that was smuggled into Open House ride back home in my son’s truck, and it puked all over the place? So his truck already smells like puke.

I didn’t want to take the puppy back home in my van, so I figured leaving the puppy with my son was a better plan, but I told him it had to STAY OUTSIDE the whole time.

He told me to drive the puppy around to the cross country course, and he would go back into the school to change clothes and then meet me out back to take the puppy. Some of you are probably wondering how my son was going to take care of the puppy if he was supposed to be practicing cross country. This is a valid question with a perfectly reasonable explanation.

My son has zero interest in cross country. He has absolutely no desire to participate in any sort of competitive running sports. He’s at cross country for one reason, and one reason only, and that reason is an attractive country girl who happens to be a beast of a distance runner and has won his affections with her tendency to pair running shorts with cowboy boots. He runs at practice to “stay in shape for basketball,” but he’s the manager for meets. Having to babysit a puppy was not going to interrupt his important training.

So I drove around to the cross country course, only to find the buses still in the back parking lot. Oops. You’re not supposed to drive around back until all the buses have cleared. I had assumed they were already gone, since I was told Carl already had to leave on the bus. Did I mention I’m the vice president of the school board? I should know better than to drive around back while the buses are still there.

A Visit from the Principal

While I was sitting in the van waiting for my son to get changed into his practice clothes, the principal showed up at my window to make sure I wasn’t a crazed lunatic hanging out in the school parking lot. I’m sure my explanation left him with no doubt I really am a crazed lunatic (just not the dangerous sort you need to worry about in regards to school security). The principal said he thought it was me, but he was just checking to be sure, and that Carl had been telling him he needed to get something from me, but he wouldn’t let him get off the bus once he had boarded.

So I had to tell the principal that it was actually the puppy sitting right there on my van seat that Carl was trying to get from me, but I had no intention of letting him zip a puppy up in his backpack to take on the bus.

Thank goodness the principal did not let Carl leave the bus to come to my van. How would that have played out? It would have probably looked something like Carl comes to my van. Then he very stealthily zips something large into his backpack and carries it suspiciously onto the bus with both the principal and bus driver watching. Yeah. That would have been great.

And why on earth did this bunch of 16/17-year-old boys think they could smuggle a puppy onto a bus in a backpack anyway? Best case scenario, that backpack (which likely held one of the school laptops and possibly some books, homework, etc.) would have been full of pee, poop, and dog puke within minutes of leaving the parking lot. Worst case scenario, the puppy has to stay completely zipped into the backpack to hide it from the bus driver so long that it suffocates on the ride home.

Certain Death?

Okay, so did I really rescue this puppy from certain death? Probably not. But my middle daughter has been learning about memoirs in her English class through the virtual academy. I haven’t personally read any of the memoirs they are discussing in the course, but while she’s logged into the live class sessions, I can hear what the teacher is saying about each story.

One aspect that has struck me as funny about all the memoirs they’ve read is that each author has been the hero in his/her own mind. So if I’m telling this memoir of my unintentional involvement in the puppy trafficking ring, then, by golly, I heroically saved this puppy from certain death! Wasn’t that brave of me?

I’m sure the puppy was actually safe all along. Carl has enough sense to make sure the puppy could breathe. He really wanted the puppy, so I know he would not have purposely put it in danger. Most likely, I didn’t save the puppy from certain death at all, but almost assuredly, I saved Carl and my son from some sort of big trouble and perhaps detention. Did they actually think they could get away with smuggling a puppy onto the school bus?

I can see a couple of 6-year-olds hatching a plan to smuggle a puppy and thinking they could really get away with it, but 16-year-olds?

We recently saw this backpack in the Five Below at Muncie. I took a picture because I was going to send it to my daughter and say her husband needed the backpack because of the Open House incident, but now I’m thinking Carl really needs this backpack.

Don’t worry. Carl was able to get the puppy anyway. The guidance counselor ended up delivering the puppy after her son finished with cross country practice. Carl loves the puppy.

All’s well that ends well, right?

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