introducing the "2 dogs"

Okay, so we know about the two kids, how about the dogs!

I was one of these people who swore that they would never get a dog. My kids nagged and nagged and nagged - especially my daughter. My response was always the same, "when you move out of home you can get yourself a dog, I'm not cleaning up messes from an animal that will never learn to do it themselves!"

Well, they wore me down.

I arranged to buy Heidi, our Spoodle, through a breeder several weeks before my daughter was diagnosed. Kept it a secret from her for ages. She'd been so out of sorts and sick on and off and seemed to just not be coping with things very well. I thought a puppy would be a good distraction for her, someone she could talk to and cuddle and take her mind off things. I had no idea at the time that there cause of her being "out of sorts" was undiagnosed Type 1 Diabetes!

I decided to tell her about the puppy while she was in hospital after she was diagnosed. She'd been through such a rough time, I wanted to give her something positive and happy to think about.

Heidi became part of our family the day after my daughter was discharged from hospital. And we could not live without her!

Even though she has not been trained to recognise fluctuations in BGL's if Heidi is around my daughter when she is low she will not leave her side.

Holly is our No. 2 puppy. She's a "Bordoodle" - a Border Collie/Poodle cross - and she's completely insane. My son desperately wanted a Border Collie but I refused to have a shedding dog. Beautiful dogs, but I could not handle the shedding. So he found a Border Collie Poodle cross breeder! No shedding. Holly's 6.5 months old and is a terror. The interesting, and slightly freaky, thing about Holly is that we'd been in touch with the breeders for several months waiting for word that the mother was pregnant, and following that, that the puppies had been born. We found out about the birth of the puppies on 25 October, 2010 - via an email sent to my phone while my son and I were at the hospital about 30 minutes after my he had been diagnosed with T1D during a series of blood tests to see if he could participate in the INIT II Clinical Trial (since he'd tested positive to high levels of T1D antibodies a few months earlier).

So, life gets a bit crazy in our house!

Oh - and did I mention that we also have 2 guinea pigs???