A girl & her dog

Every year on Easter, I look forward to searching the house for hilariously bad clues hand-written by the Easter Bunny. This scavenger hunt eventually leads my siblings and I to our candy-gift-filled baskets. (And yes, I am the youngest child, meaning the rest of my sibs are in fact older than 22 — just another one of our awesome family traditions.)

The Easter before last, however, I got something much better than a basket full of jelly bellies, Swedish fish & Cadbury eggs.. I got Ziggy Stardust.

I begged my parents to let me get a dog for months. I was obsessed. I swooned over every cute dog on Petfinder.com, forced Austin to look at pages and pages of googled puppies and even watched parts of the puppy Superbowl. Somehow I convinced my parents to come with me to a pet rescue ranch in Ocala to see the litter of Beagle/Cavalier King Charles Spaniel mixes I saw on Petfinder — I swore up and down that I just wanted to see them and we didn’t have to get one that day (they wanted me to wait until I lived at home for the summer so the pup could be house-trained in a non-deposit-sensitive environment).
But then we saw her.

She was the only completely blonde puppy in the whole litter. She was also the only one crawling toward me on her belly instead of jumping frantically on the fence. She was perfect.

She puked on me five minutes into the ride home.

I named her Ziggy Stardust after this song and within a few days she became best friends with our older & wiser blondie dog, Scout. They cuddle, play tug-of-war & wrestle constantly.

The ranch owner told me Ziggy would be 20 pounds max, and if I was a runner like I said I was, it would be wise to get the rambunctious black lab pup chewing on my flip flops instead — this baby beagle is not a runner, he said.

She currently weighs over 40 pounds, usually has one ear flipped up and has run up to 8 miles in one trip. She is quite the athlete.

Maybe that’s why she loves the Gators.

Just like her sister.