In late June, my wife discovered that her cousin’s dog had a litter of puppies. We had been keeping an eye out for the right dog since earlier in the year, when the whole family started feeling that pull toward getting one. We had actually fostered a puppy with the plan of adopting him, but he was a Jack Russell Terrier who could escape from virtually anything, and I ended up returning him to the shelter out of genuine concern that he was going to injure himself. On the Fourth of July we headed over to her cousin’s place, and her cousin had told us the day before that the puppy she had been calling Beverly was ready to go home with someone.

I know for certain that the mother is a yellow Labrador because I got to meet her myself. The father is apparently a Border Collie, which immediately caught my attention because those dogs are strikingly beautiful. The mix does not look much like a Border Collie at all, though. I also got to see most of the litter, with our puppy being the one at the bottom with the brown fur. We settled on the name Coconut because she genuinely looks like one, and I gave Lily the final say since she had promised to take on some responsibility for the dog. In practice we almost always just call her Coco.

We left Jessica’s cousin’s house on the earlier side to make sure we got back before dark. Lily held Coco for the whole drive home, which ran about an hour. Coco handled the car ride reasonably well. At one point I thought she was about to have an accident, so we pulled into a random gas station and took her around back, but she did not end up doing anything.

The morning before we picked Coco up, I found a pet playpen on Facebook Marketplace for $35 and grabbed it. That turned out to be a smart call, because she chews and gets into everything, and the playpen at least reduces the damage to some degree. It is not a particularly sturdy setup, and from what I can tell it can only be anchored properly outside using ground stakes. For now we have it semi-stabilized by pushing heavy boxes and furniture up against the sides, but she still manages to drag the whole thing toward whatever she wants to get into, and she finds ways around our safeguards anyway. So far the worst of it has been a chewed blanket and a piece of paper she decided to nibble on.

The chewing has been the biggest ongoing challenge. Apparently the Border Collie side of her makes that habit worse than it tends to be in most puppies. As of when I wrote this she had only completed one round of vaccinations, though the second should have happened before this gets published. She has grown noticeably since we brought her home, a little larger than in the photo here, and she is supposed to end up being a bigger dog. Unfortunately both kids have been hesitant to really connect with her because of the chewing and her claws weren’t cut for a month. I am hopeful I can get her behavior under enough control that they feel comfortable, and there has been some genuine progress on the chewing front. She has also adjusted to being alone in the house while we are at work and is no longer turning the place upside down and stinky with puppy poop.