Growing up there was also one question that my brother and I could ask that would always be followed with a no.  This magical question was for our family to get a pet dog.  For as long as I could remember my brother and I had always been begging my mother to get a dog, and every time she would say no and tell us all about her pet allergy.  We had always had fish but that was no fun.  You aren’t able to pick up a fish and play with it.  Eventually when I was in first grade my mother and father let me get a pet hamster as a bit of compromise.  Which wasn’t a dog but it was a start, and I wasn’t going to say no to a hamster.  Deep down I really wanted a dog, for me though a hamster was just a way for me to get my foot in the door towards obtaining my ultimate goal of a dog.  So later that week my family and I made our way to the pet store and we bought my hamster, he was an albino dwarf hamster and I named him Tom.  He was a cute little ball of all white fluffy hair with two big beady red eyeballs on each side of his little head.  I really did love Tom even though he wasn’t a dog.  I’d had all of your basic hamster needs, I had the cage with all of the tubes inside so he could crawl inside them, the hamster wheel for him to run on and most of all I had the hamster ball that I could put him in and well sort of play with him but not really.

I’d had Tom for almost a year now, which meant I was in second grade, and it had been great I really liked Tom but I couldn’t walk him or anything and when I would pick him up it would usually lead to him biting my hand.  It never really hurt that bad but that was one reason it never really felt live having a pet, it just felt like I was taking care of an old senile family member only they were about the size of a tennis ball and were furry with red eyes.  Then one day after school my mom and dad were in the car with my brother, this was sometime in mid December, with all of them there together it seemed sort of odd, because I usually get picked up my just my mom.  So we were all in the car and when my brother and I would ask where we were going my parents would just say nowhere.  This seemed odd to Joe and I.  Joe is my brothers name.  We had been driving for no more than thirty minutes until we had turned into a small parking lot outside of a store that had a big sign on the front that said Puppy Lovers.  So we went inside.  When we first came in we were greeted by a woman who was an employee there.  My mom had been there before because she told them exactly what dog to get out and have us look at.  Me and Joe went crazy.  We were playing with a real live puppy that was going to be our very own, the dog that we were playing with was a very small miniature poodle that couldn’t have weighed more than four pounds and his hair was all brown, we were in love instantly and couldn’t get enough of this new puppy. So we brought him home and the first thing he does is pee all over our kitchen floor, but it’s not that big of a deal he’s a young puppy, in a new environment he is definitely scared and a little anxious.  It took some time and a lot of debate but we decided to name him Cocoa.  He was so cute and we loved him.

But that wasn’t enough.

We later, around the time that I was going into seventh grade, my mom, brother and I really wanted another dog.  At first my mom wasn’t so sure about getting a dog but Cocoa was hypoallergenic meaning he doesn’t shed and he won’t bother my mom's allergies at all.  She really loved Cocoa.  So she was all about getting another dog the only person that objected to it was my dad.  But he doesn’t really like to involve himself at all with Cocoa so he figured the same would go with the next dog.  Cocoa only grew up to be around fourteen to fifteen pounds so he wasn’t very big, my brother and I wanted a big dog.  In order to get a dog that was big and didn’t bother my mother’s alleries we had decided that the best choice in dog was to get a standard poodle which can grow up to 65 pounds which was just what Joe and I wanted.  We later that day went and drove down to the breeder and picked up our second dog.  He turned out to be an all black standard poodle and we decided in the car ride back that his name should be Shadow.  To this day he lives up to that name, not only because of his hair color but because he will just follow you around everywhere you go, it’s just like having a second Shadow with you at all times.

Starting out in a family that didn’t care so much about dogs, just by convincing our parents to get a dog was enough to make them love dogs so much.  For both of my parents Cocoa was there first dog ever and ever since then they have become some of the biggest lovers of dogs around always loving to take our dogs on walks and meet other dogs and their owners.  Having dogs was one of the best decisions ever made and I can’t imagine my life without them now.