Saturday, December 09, 2006

The Best Laid Plans

O.k. -- so the plan was simple. Drop Azure off for her next transport and return to Misfit Farm with Ava, a sweet little partially-blind, Deaf one-year-old foster Dane, in tow.

As we woke to a beautiful Saturday morning, it appeared that the plan had worked. Ava was settling in and very, very quickly winning our hearts. The introduction to the other dogs the previous evening had gone exceedingly well. We should have known right then that there was something amiss in the cosmos.

Ava claimed an empty dog bed in the bedroom, and an easy chair in the living room. Her almost completely-white coat was an outward manifestation of her inner sweetness, pure sugar. She gamely followed us outside for our morning goat feeding, and the sound we heard in the cool morning air was her teeth chattering. We started to work on signs with her, and she picked up “sit” nearly immediately. As we worked with her, it became clear that when you had her attention, she would turn her head so her one good eye had you in its scope, and her attentiveness was expressed by a tilt of the head. Words cannot express how absolutely adorable she was.

We spent Saturday bathing all of the Krewe, bringing Ava’s white coat to a shiny brilliance. Thinking that it would be easier to get her attention if she had a harness rather than a collar to take hold of, we outfitted her in a lovely red harness, nestled her into a warm, cozy bed and went to sleep Saturday evening, planning to spend the day on Sunday acquainting dear, sweet Ava with life here at MisFit Farm and hoping she would fall in love with us as we were falling in love with her.

Imagine our surprise to awake to the phone ringing on Sunday morning. Something had gone horribly wrong with Azure’s adoptive placement. So wrong that a desperate woman loaded her into the car and began a marathon drive from Minnesota to Southern Missouri at four in the morning. So wrong that this poor woman slept on the floor in front of Azure’s crate the previous night, just in case there was a jailbreak. So wrong that Azure had been medicated for part of the ride north to meet her adoptive family. So wrong that Azure was tethered into the back seat of the car for the return trip to Missouri.

Change of plans.

Could we, would we, pretty please, intercept the reverse Dane Train as far north in Northern Missouri as possible, and retrieve Azure? Oh, and could we take Ava with us and possibly trade?
We would like to chalk this up to our second foster success. But that would be wrong. We really cannot take credit for what happened next, and have only ourselves to blame.

Change of plans.

Amazingly enough, we haven’t been able to find a permanent home for Azure. As the days pass and she acclimates more to us, enjoys the crazy chasing games in the yard, steals toys and gamely submits when her toys are stolen, learns new signs such as “home” for her crate, and becomes more predictable (i.e. we can see the next victim of her search-and-destroy toy missions), it looks more and more like we have another “perma-fost.” We would like to be sad about this, but as it turns out, Azure is about 90% puppy and 10% crazy, which we can live with, as one of those conditions will resolve itself with time, structure and stability. We have made the hardest step, which is forgiving her for not being Ava. The rest comes pretty naturally.