Adding to our Family
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Craig and I posted this to our social media accounts in December 2015. Everyone thought it was a baby announcement at first! Photo by Walking Eagle Photography.
The first photo I took of Ravioli when we picked him up!
Since Ravioli is a huge part of our story and life (and honestly the equivalent to a human son/brother), I will be doing plenty of posts on him. I want to start with a doozy of a story that actually includes Reece! You will see how as you read below. I’m super excited to tell this story. Any chance I get to tell people how this all happened, I do! I find myself always bringing this up when people tell us that Ravioli is so well behaved especially for how young he is and my response is that we had to get lots of training for him since we were about to have a puppy and a baby! (Hi Graham!)
Ravioli came to us by fate. When Craig and I decided that we wanted to get a dog we knew right away that it would be a yellow lab or a golden retriever. We had been in talks for MONTHS with a Southern California breeder for a yellow lab but at the last minute it fell through. We were actually crushed since we were planning on bringing home our lab from the current new litter (but he was kept by the owner as a potential show dog). Ironically we had ALWAYS wanted an English Cream golden retriever since our best friends, Christa and Andy, had gotten one (named Tripp) 6 years earlier. I originally looked for their breeder but couldn’t find the website and assumed they didn’t exist any longer and then pursued a yellow lab breeder from another friend. When we got the news that our yellow lab wasn’t happening, I searched once again for Tripp’s breeder. On a stroke of luck or fate I found the breeder’s website! I’m not sure if it had been taken down, or what, but I couldn’t believe my luck and immediately texted Christa to confirm that was where they got Tripp. In case you are wondering where we got Rav, he came from Creston, CA and you have to email goldenpuppies@live.com for more info (I’m assuming they are still around). Anyways, right away I heard back from the puppy caretaker and they had a couple puppies left that were available. This was crazy news to us since the yellow lab breeder process was completely different and would take months to get our puppy. It turned out that Rav’s breeder always had puppies and we would bring him home on the same day we expected to take the lab home! This was all taking place around January 5, 2016 and we were to Skype with the caretaker the next day on January 6.
We picked Ravioli on a Skype call! Can you tell which one is him?!
Ravioli’s caretaker doing some puppy tests on him! Apparently since he didn’t mind being on his back he was a good contender.
The next day, January 7, I woke up at 6am and decided I should take a pregnancy test! (Haha!) Well you know where this is going….
Tests 2 and 3 taken at 6:03am (of course 10 tests are necessary when finding out you are pregnant!)
I woke Craig up and told him the news and he did NOT believe me even after seeing the pregnancy tests! We were both freaking out…it was Thursday and on Saturday we were picking up our new puppy! What have we done!? Should we cancel our pup? No way, this would be good practice! Also: we were so excited to be pregnant!
Two days later, we made the drive up to Creston to pick up our puppy! We discussed a name for him in the days before and decided we wanted something totally different that no one would ever name their dog and something you would never hear at the dog park! I had seen that Beth Stern named one of her foster kittens Ravioli and that stuck with me since I was Italian! We polled our friends and they all thought it was hilarious and genius. One of our friends, Leah, suggested his middle name and it was history from there! Ravioli Cannoli would be our new English Cream golden retriever family member!
Side note: this was all taking place during the Zika crisis and we had a trip planned on February 2, 2016 to go to Carnival in Rio de Janeiro! We had already planned on Christa and Andy coming out to San Diego to babysit our new puppy (which they couldn’t be more excited to do!) while we went on our trip. Now that I was pregnant there was no way we were going to Rio and we cancelled the trip a few days before and booked another trip to Chicago instead!
See below for our first photos of Ravioli and a couple photos from our Chicago trip with our little bean (Reece!).
Here are our first photos ever together as a family of 3 on our car ride back home to San Diego with Ravioli!
Scroll through our first few days with Rav! 1/9-1/12/16. At the time we were calling him Oli and thought that would be his nickname! It only stuck for the first month since Andy called him Rav for the first time while they were babysitting for us!
Can you handle the cuteness?? These are from 1/12-1/15/16. Can you believe how many cute photos I took of him in only the first 6 days of getting him? Imagine how many photos I would take of our future human child! Love every one of these, especially baby Rav on my barely there baby bump :)
All of theses photos were from January 16. I mean can you handle the cuteness??!! A word to the wise: when you get a puppy or have a baby, start making photo albums immediately so you aren’t stuck with 70,000 photos 3.5 years later!
Here are the rest of the photos of our sweet boy Ravioli from the month of January 2016! We picked him up when he was 7.5 weeks old and ended the month at 11 weeks old!
Our little bean’s first trip to Chicago! (Reece)
