Oh Gretta

As a newlywed couple living in a home with a yard, we thought we just might would like to have a dog. We knew that owning a dog, or even a pet, in our life stage right now wasn't possible due to the fact that we might have to leave it behind in a year. So, we just dreamed of the idea until we heard of this awesome program deal. In Johnston County where we live, they have an animal protection league that offers a dog fostering program. In the program you foster a dog from the shelter until it is adopted. They provide you a crate, food, leash, all needed medications or vet visits, all you have to do is love the dog and care for it in your home and take it each Saturday to Petsmart near our house for the adoption fair. We heard about it from a friend and immediately I was excited for a new playmate at home while Harrison is working during the week. So, we completed all the paper work and background checks and were so excited to get a new puppy. I went out of town for a bachelorette weekend for one of my friends in Savannah and Harrison went to pick out our dog that Saturday afternoon while I was gone.

Harrison went to Petsmart and this week they only had one dog left that desperately needed a home. She was a rotweiler mix dog about one year old. She had recently been rescued from where she wasn't being properly fed and was just the cutest thing. So, we got her. Now, Gretta had just been fixed so she was still in her recovery stage from surgery and all she wanted to do was lay in your lap and snuggle. We loved having her crawl up in bed with us and she brought so much joy and laughter at the silly things she would do. But then, everything seemed to change one instance after another...

After having her for about 5 days, we noticed her surgery area swelling and she stopped wanting to eat and just became lazier and lazier. We took her to church with us that Wednesday night for our friend who also is fostering a dog to look at her and we made some calls. Thursday we took her back to the vet school at NC State where they had fixed her and found out her surgery area was infected. They gave us medicine and sent her home to come back the next day for another check up. She progressively got better each day and after her adoption fair on Saturday where she wasn't adopted we took home a much more livelier Gretta than before.

Now, let me first remind you all of our living conditions. We live in a house next door to our church that they own with plans to tear down in the future for a needed church expansion. Our back yard is not fenced in and so we can't let Gretta run free on her own. Plus she is new to us and we know no history as to if she would run to the road or stay close by. So, she's constrained to being close by to us outside or inside most of the time.

Tired at her playdate with Princess

So, Sunday we put her in her kennel and headed to church. We returned to a crazy discovery. This livelier Gretta had forced her way out of her metal kennel and had proceeded to all but maybe 3 window in our house jumping up on the blinds and ripping them right down the middle. And so we discovered she goes crazy when left alone.

Guest bedroom blinds took most of the hits

She even took over the bed whenever one of us would get up

And that was just the beginning to a crazy week. On Monday, she began showing the puppy side of her and that consisted of chewing things up. We have some great friends who gave us a bunch of old puppy toys which she knocked out one by one chewing up. But hey that was ok because I would rather vacuum up strands of yarn from a puppy toy than shreds of my favorite house shoes, which she got ahold of when she got bored from her shoes. We did venture to a local dog park where we didn't know if she would go crazy rotweiler and attack the dogs or not and luckily she was a fun playful dog playing with everyone else there.

Now without a dog kennel due to her Sunday escapades we now had to resort to taking her everywhere we went or barricading her in to specific areas in our house. Now an interesting thing about our house is that there are no doors from the den, through the dining room, kitchen and into the playroom/laundry/pingpong table room. We wanted to constrain her to the 2 rooms with no carpet to prevent accidents on the carpet and in order to do that we attempted many options which she would destroy as if it were a game all the way until we used our kitchen table which seemed to work quite well. We just had to resort to eating our meals with our food in our laps.

kitchen table barricade

This constraining her to two rooms only brought about boredom to her which led to what things in here can I destroy.... She could knock our guest bedroom door open to give her a bed to jump on and lots of Harrison's shoes to find and pull out of his closet. Luckily we got to the shoes before they were destroyed every time.

On about Thursday of our second week with Gretta we did some Christmas wrapping paper shopping and put together two packages to send to our friends in EA from both of our two cities we lived in. Now the typical Christmas packaging consists of things like Christmas tree scented candles, candycanes, apple cider mix, cookie mixes and candy. A particular candy we had gotten for one of the packages was the movie theater box style candies with sweet tarts and reece pieces. All of our shopping items were placed on the pingpong table as we were headed out to the first UNC basketball game that night. Yet when we came home we would discover something else.

Gretta had now jumped up onto the pingpong table where she had destroyed yet another set of blinds, chewed up 2 rolls of wapping paper and started to work on chewing on a fire starter log before realizing that it didn't taste good. And that was the last straw for me! We had just received our official acceptance to join staff and head back overseas in the next year or so and were about to be traveling a lot for weddings, Christmas, conferences and money raising and this was not what I wanted to come home to every night in addition.

fire starter log...

So, we spent our last day with Gretta on Friday playing at the doggie park, going over to Harrison's parents house and playing with their dog and destroying more doggy toys. Then, Saturday I took her to the adoption fair and explained we would be out of town too much now and couldn't keep her anymore. It was sad driving off and watching her bark and pull towards me but I knew that we couldn't do it anymore. Now, I arrived back home to finally get to spend the afternoon cleaning up all of her mess and as I cleaned off the pingpong table and finished packing the boxes to go to our friends I discovered something was missing. I searched and yet all I could find was shreds from the box it was in. Not only did Gretta go to town on a fire starter log and the blinds and wrapping paper, she also ate an entire box of reece's pieces! Oh Gretta, how you are still alive, we do not know. We love her and miss her but she's not coming back to this house!

and this was her please don't make me leave face.... sorry

Note: for those of you concerned about my blinds.... I have now duct taped them all back together with white duct tape.... We are also excited to report that Gretta has now since been adopted by a family and has a home!