The Baby Puppy Adventure.

We lost Baby Puppy yesterday. It was a very sad day. As you can see she is 'one of the family', as I actually agreed to take portraits of her, much to my 3 year olds delight. She follows in the line of much loved animals in our family, starting with "Droopy" who is now 30+ years old and is still going strong , despite probably carrying bacterias and nasty critters. Then we've got "Baby Peeps", who is not doing too bad for his 12 years. He has grown into a very unusual dull shade of gray and has lots of bald spots, but is still very much loved.
We searched this house over and over, upside and down. It was a rough night. We ran a few errands yesterday, but Joe was 99.999% sure baby puppy didn't leave the house. Tonight at the dinner table, I suggested we call Lowe's just in case it showed up there. Joe called and asked the customer service if they "had any pink poodles". He was put on hold and again reaffirmed that he thought it never left the house. Lowe's lady came back on the line and said, "We have a pink poodle...it's REALLY dirty." Joe was stunned and continued to ask some specifics about it because he was still in denial, while I thought to myself, "It's baby puppy! How many pink poodles do you find in a hardware store?!?!" I went right over to get it, wondering what kind of shape it was in, how many carts had rolled over it, how many 2x4's dropped on it...I was expecting the worst. She hands him over and he was just the way we left him. One man's dirt is another 3 year old girl's love, I guess.