happy birthday dear monster

today our little maddie face turns one!

long ago when we lived up at honeyrock there was a wonderful dog named sadie. we loved sadie and when her owner talked about breeding her we told him we wanted one of those pups! we didn't really think that would happen but last winter he let us know that he was in fact breeding her and that one of her pups was ours! 

sadie was a champ and had TEN puppies. last april we went up to pick one out. rick handed me this little bundle and said "I think this is the one" and he was right! i loved her right away (even though they were mostly just balls of fur and poop at that point). this is her that day in april. 

i tied a green ribbon around her neck and we went home for another month until she was ready to come home. at that point we thought we were going to call her zoey (after the daughter on the west wing) and the wonderful ribbe & ledbetter kids spent a lot of time loving on "zoey". by the time we were ready to go pick her up we were pretty sure zoey wasn't the right name. 

i had always wanted to name a dog wrigley, but it turns out every cubs fan in the world names their dog wrigley. not original at all. so we talked about other cub names: sandberg- sandy for short. perfect right? too perfect. no one would ever realize that a yellow lab named sandy was named for ryne sandberg. every other cub name i could think of wouldn't work for a girl dog. until...maddux! some say he isn't really a cub since he played most of his career for the braves, but to me greg maddux will always be a cub. so we set off to pick up little miss maddux. 

 

that's her the day we picked her up and she's been our faithful monster ever since! 

here she is this week- blissfully unaware that she's about to cross the bridge into adulthood: 

 

and yes. if you're wondering, she's very pleased that her namesake has returned to the cubs. very please indeed.

happy birthday maddie monster! we pray you'll have many many more!