Smiles in the Johnson House

There's a lot of smiling, laughing, squealing, shrieking, and giggling going on in the Johnson house.

Yesterday we added a new member to our family. His name is Oreo, and he's a 10 month old yorkie-poo.

If you've spent any time at all with Kerri, you know that she is completely obsessed with animals (well, any type of creature, really, remember this??), but her absolute favorite is dogs. I don't know how long the girls have been begging for a dog, but I do know that we promised them that they could have one in May after Andy graduated from school. Well, because of all the traveling we did during the summer and then with our move, it just didn't work out. As soon as we got settled in here, I decided that one of my top priorities should be to find a dog for our family. I thought that it was going to be a lot harder than it was because we had a pretty specific list of the type of dog we wanted and a pretty low budget of what we (read Andy) were willing to spend on a pet. I found out about this one pretty quickly, and the girls and I took off to check him out. It was love at first sight between him and Kerri, Emma Lee and I were a little nervous that he might be too hyper, but he started calming down a bit after his initial overly excited greeting. (Although, I'll take our greeting over how he greeted Andy for the first time. As soon as he walked in the door, Oreo ran up to him and soaked his shoes - and it wasn't from kisses either! Not exactly getting off on the right foot!)

He's a really sweet dog, and the best thing is that he's housebroken (as long as his initial greeting for Andy won't be an everyday occurrence!) and past the stage of wanting to chew or bite on everything. He's fully grown and weighs about eleven pounds. He's got enough energy to where I'm not sure whether him or the girls will wear out first, but either way, they should all sleep good at night! He has the soft silky hair of a yorkie, but it's wavy and has loose curls because of the poodle part. He's rarely barked since he's been here, and he's not too interested in Felix, who is definitely not appreciating his solo pet status being taken away. 

Emma Lee has already invented a game called Tumbleweed where her and Kerri roll around on the floor and he climbs all over them trying to get them.

I'm definitely going to have to put a limit on the amount of treats they're allowed to pass out because they were handing them out for "tricks," which somehow includes anything and everything - even wagging his tail.  

Welcome to the family, Oreo!