Surprise!

Here's the surprise that we promised you!

Yes, he is ours! Before we go into how this happened, here's a brief profile of our little guy:

Name: "Patches" (this was the name he was given when we got him)

Sex: Male

Age: 6.5 weeks as of blog post date

Weight: Guesstimating 5lbs

Sign: Virgo, born on September 1, 2010

Breed: (Namibian) retriever mix..?

Family history: From a litter of 13! Apparently his brothers and sisters came from 3 Dads. If someone can refer me to some reading about how this is possible, that would be lovely.

Appearance: Short-haired. White with light brown patches, note the ones adorably placed covering his 2 ears (also note the dark brown color neatly lining the rim of his ears), the 1 on top of his head, and the one over his right eye. His eye color is blue-gray, really cute, and you can notice that his right eye looks as though he has black eye liner on and his left eye is white all around it.

Likes: Cuddling, being held, sleeping while being held, sleeping while being held on 4-5 hour car rides, fake sleeping (so we don't remove him from our laps), playing tug of war, chewing on stuff, chicken

Dislikes: Being left alone, not being held, being required to use his own 4 healthy legs to travel short distances

HOW PATCHES MADE US A METZ FAMILY OF 3:

Patches became a Metz this past Thursday evening. Last Sunday, while socializing after the contemporary church service we have been attending during training in Okahandja, we discovered that the American missionaries running the church were looking for homes for the puppies of their dog's litter of 13. We (us, 2 PC trainees in our group, 1 PC volunteer serving in Okahandja) decided we'd walk to their house to check them out, and the PCV (who had already seen the puppies) said she was pretty sure she was going to get one. I teased Kevin about getting a puppy to get a rise out of him, and he was oddly open to that possibility. After seeing the puppies, he was oddly even more receptive to the idea of having a dog in Namibia. I asked if he felt OK, checked his vital signs, felt his forehead, and after making him pinch me to attempt to wake me up from this dream, we seriously discussed the pros and cons of the idea. And well.. you know the result..!

I can hear and see both of our families laughing about this in disbelief and elbowing each other, but let me tell you that Kevin has found a second love of his life (though, a distant second)!

Of the litter, we chose Patches because (1) he is insanely adorable, and (2) there were only a couple shorter-haired ones and we figured Khorixas (the town where we will be permanently placed) is supposed to get very hot. Patches also has a sister, Star (now "Kupenda," which apparently means "to love" in Swahili) who looks similar to him, but she is mostly white with very few markings. The PCV I mentioned earlier is taking her, so we're definitely hoping to have puppy play dates when possible (keep in mind, our sites are 4 hours away).

DAYS 1-3:

Being a few days deep into this thing, we have learned a lot. One is that Patches is even more insanely adorable than we had first realized. He is a freaking cuddle monster.

It has been a huge challenge to have him sleep on his own, or for that matter, be awake and not in someone's arms! We are working on that one, and hope that our sleepless nights will be less sleepless soon. The first night we let him sleep with us since he was kind of a nervous nelly, but he did wet the bed, which is problematic. However since we don't plan to have him sleep with us anyway, we tried the second night to kind of do the thing where the parent lays in bed with the child until they fall asleep and then slips silently away to their own bedroom. Well, Patches wasn't having that because after not very long, he was awake and persistently crying for us to be with him. He is sleeping in our room even, but just confined to the tile floor part of it rather than the carpet, but apparently this isn't good enough. So advice would be awesome. But I will remind you that we do not have a kennel for him, although we do have a cardboard box we could "lock" him in..

I will add that I am posting this on Night 3, and he is doing SO much better, sleeping on the floor next to us, rather than in our bed! Also I think after 1 day of training he now understands the command "go potty" and will usually listen to us, which is pretty awesome.

Let me also mentioned that he traveled amazingly with us on our 4-5 hour car ride to Khorixas yesterday. He just slept angelically in our laps, even despite there being little room because the car was PACKED with 3 people and 1 dog in the back as well, as the bags that did not fit in the trunk. However just earlier that day, we closed him in the small laundry room of our host family's house so that we could attend the Swearing-In Ceremony (we are officially volunteers now!), but just as the group of us were lining up oustide the building to make our grand entrance, our 19-year-old host sister comes up to us with Patches close to her in her bag, saying she just couldn't leave him at home because he was crying so much. Though he was a wreck at home (mostly by his lonesome), he returned to his angelic state, sleeping in our host sister's lap during the 2-hour ceremony. Afterwards, fellow volunteers were quite glad to have him there (and, of course, we were too) so Patches was passed along and held a good deal (which he mostly enjoyed).

CONCLUDING REMARKS:

This was a surprise for us too! We definitely were not expecting to get a dog in the Peace Corps!

And to answer what many of you are probably wondering, we are not sure what will happen with Patches at the end of our PC service in Namibia. Basically the choices are either to (1) pass him on to a dog-loving Namibian or another volunteer, (2) to let him be a Namibian dog and live pretty much as a stray pack dog eating food scraps (which will require a certain upbringing to make sure he can survive like this; and we know this sounds awful, but this is just the way it is done here, and I wouldn't necessarily say those dogs are greatly suffering), or (3) to do what we have to do to bring him home to America. PCVs have done this before, and it is actually not extremely difficult if he has the necessary vaccines (which he will). So we'll have to see how this relationship unfolds and what Kevin and I think about being a dog-owning couple, as he is our first.

By the way, Patches was the name he was given by his mom's family, and we are open to changing it, though we do like that his full name can be "Patches O'Houlihan" (ref. "Dodgeball," the movie). Kevin's pretty picky with names, but we do agree that he could be a "Martin" or "Patrick." Any suggestions?

Hopefully we didn't disappoint anyone who was banking on the surprise being that we stumbled across some Namibian diamonds and were sending some your way..!