It's a Girl - Dog

We happily welcome the newest member of our family - Cali.

She just turned four, weighs 77 pounds, loves children, and is perfectly polite, so far. It has only been 24 hours.

Cali is a black lab mix and is fitting in well with our family members. She has been quite the novelty as has already be walked three times, pet and scratched numerous times, had two car rides, been given treats, fed, watered, and fought over for a sleeping partner. She even got to visit our neighbors, and my youngest noticed that their dog Rico, tried to get a "piggy back" ride from Cali. Hmmm.

We originally drove to the shelter to get her brother, a handsome golden colored boy with very soft fur. Clyde was very skittish around our noisy brood, and hid behind the trainers legs the whole time we were there. I suggested that we visit with "Star" his sister, and she instantly loved us and we loved her.

After filtering through a myriad of name changes including, Shadow, Regan, Molly, Lilly, Charlotte, and Nancy, we settled on Cali since that was the name we had picked out for our fourth child if he ended up being a she.

Our youngest is not happy about our choice of names for our new dog and continues to call her everything but Cali. He is strong willed like that. I had to threaten him with a time out for confusing out little girl and calling her six different names. He continues to be bitter, and ask for an explanation as to why he has to call her Cali.

In his last ditch name change effort, he figured out that Cali is also short for California and suggested that we our dog her Amer. "Well" he stated attempting to convince everyone that is was a choice name, "It's short for America."

That kid.