A-Team Down Under: Martha My Dear

Six or seven months ago, we decided it was time to get a dog. Browsing around various sites, I ran across an ad looking for a dog-sitter. It was for a cute spoodle (cocker spaniel/poodle cross). The owners were a young family with a baby, who were about to start remodelling their house. While the construction was occurring, they planned to live in her mom's apartment, which isn't very suitable for a dog. It sounded perfect, so we met with the family. Their dog, Beth (not a very doggy name, I know!), was adorable, and they could tell we'd give her lots of love and attention.

Beth

For the next four months, we regularly kept Beth at our place. Thankfully the owner of our rental house agreed to let us have a dog. Occasionally Beth's owners would take her for weekends, or whenever we went away. It was the perfect chance for the girls to prove they'd help take care of a dog. I took all of the money they paid us, and put it in a separate account.
We grew to love this dog. Beth was the same type of dog I had as a child, although in the US the breed was unfortunately named cockapoo instead of spoodle. When Beth's hair/fur got longer, she looked similar to Alby:

Alexi (aged 9?) with Alby, and Alexi a few years later with Beth

Even Nana loved Beth:

Once our friends found out we were in the dog-sitting "business," we had lots of requests over the next few months, including the following dogs:

Magic and Beth

Ozzie

Beth and Quin

Archie and Ollie

Jessie, Archie and Ollie

All the while we've been looking for a dog of our own. But the timing never seemed right. We knew we'd have to wait until after our Bali trip in September, and then we knew we'd have to wait until after we watched a few dogs over the Christmas holidays. We knew we wanted either a spoodle or a cavoodle, which is a cavalier king charles mixed with a poodle. Archie, in the pics above, is a cavoodle. Unfortunately, they are heavily in demand as pets because of their loving yet clever personalities and minimally-shedding fur. Hence they are expensive (I saw some as high as $2500, though $1800 was more common for cavoodles), and can be difficult to get. Often breeders run waitlists, and we ultimately went on one of the waitlists ourselves.

On Friday, I found an ad online for two poodle crosses. We sent an email, then called on Saturday morning. We arranged to see them at 2 pm that day.

We had some time to kill, so we rented a tennis court so Alexi could try out her new tennis racquet (a Christmas pressie!) Seemed especially appropriate since the Australian Open is currently going on here in Melb.

The girls, Gram, and Alexi also spent some time making rainbow loom bracelets and charm. Rainbow looms are the latest craze, and Gram brought thousands of the special colored elastics used to make all sorts of items.

Now back to the subject of dogs. This is a story of dogs after all. Even the title of the post is Martha My Dear. That's a song from the Beatles White Album that Paul wrote about/for? his dog Martha.

After lunch, we headed out to view the dogs. Andy held out his phone with a text message so I could read the address and put it into the GPS. I was quite suprised to find out it was on the same street in a town 30 minutes away where we'd looked at a supposed spoodle a month ago while the Ransoms were in town. The odds of that seem quite astounding, so much so that when we got to the house, I asked her if she knew the people down the street. She didn't. And now, here are the two puppies she was selling:

Pretty cute, eh? One boy, one girl. They are crosses of a spoodle and cavoodle, ironically enough the two breeds we'd wanted. The boy had a longer snout, and was much more outgoing. He was also more inclined to bite/chew. The girl had an adorable face, more proportioned, but seemed much calmer and a bit more timid. We spent about 20 minutes with them, but just couldn't decide. We decided to leave and think about it, as we were expecting to hear shortly about the waitlist we were on for another breeder. We got a few kilometers down the road, discussing the dogs and what to do, whether we liked them, which one we liked, if we wanted to wait....In the end, we decided we just couldn't pass up the girl and went back to the house. The price was right (cheaper than the other breeder) and we could only hope she'd be less timid once she got to know us.

Had to go back out one more tie and find an atm for the cash, but eventually the sale was made and we put her in the car:

and brought her home:

Think we made the right choice? Could YOU pass up this face?? Although, if we could have afforded her brother, I would have taken both of them!

She's three months old, a bit older than puppies typically are when they leave a breeder. Here, it's usually 8-9 weeks old. She did pretty well overnight, making it until 5:30 am when I took her outside.

We're still working on names, though at the moment I think it's Tazzie, short for Tasmania, the island state here in Oz. I really wanted an Aussie-type name, since she'll be our ultimate Australian souvenir. We once thought Ozzie would be a good name, but we dog-sat a border collie named Ozzie, so now she just doesn't seem like an Ozzie. Other Aussie names on our list were:

Joey (sounds more boyish, but hey, remember Katie Holmes in Dawson's Creek?)
Dingo
Sheila
Kiah (aboriginal word meaning "from the beautiful place")
Miki (aboriginal word meaning "moon")
Kylie (Minogue, or Western Australian word for boomerang)
Sydney
Lucky (some Aussies refer to Oz as the Lucky Country, and we were lucky to get her)
Vicky (for Victoria, the state Melbourne is in)
Tori (the other option for Victoria)
Caulie (short for Caulfield, our suburb. Our friend even went so far as to suggest the royal name of Caufield Latte of Lamington..hmm, Lamington, or Lamb Chop??)

Some think that the A-team should have an A name for their dog. The only A name on our list was Abby, although some suggested Allie or Annie.

Other cute names were Maggie, Molly (name of our previous dog), Dobby (Alanna's a huge Harry Potter fan), Biscuit (she looks just like the dog in the stories), Teddy, or Bailey.

We held multiple elections, even trying to do the results using the Aussie system of preferential voting. At first, we thought it was going to be Lucky. For the last few hours, we've been calling her Tassie. Still not completely sure. What do you think?? Leave suggestions in the comments! And now, I need to go cuddle that adorable puppy asssuming Andy's not holding her: