Freya.

Being wholehearted and unequivocal dog lovers, we had been waiting for the right time to have a dog. Feeling more settled in our jobs and in our lives, half-joking conversations and casual searches soon turned into more serious and fervent efforts (plus a few rounds of “are we really doing this?”) to find our dog. Since early fall we were searching, looking at the websites of our local adoption agencies and shelters, knowing the kind of dog we wanted would be intelligent, have a good temperament, be energetic, playful and sweet. Whichever dog would join our family would be around for 10-15 years, and we didn’t want to rush and bring home the first dog we found.

In our journey to adopt, we were unsuccessful at many turns, with others beating us to the dogs we wanted. With Freya, however, we got in first. We read about her—a 10-week-old Australian Cattle Dog mix formerly named Andre because the adoption agency initially thought he was a boy (whoops), rescued from Northern Saskatchewan with her mother and sister—and we could already tell through her pictures that she was the dog we were looking for. We met her and her foster family on Sunday, December 8th. We went into it nervous, unsure of how it would go, yet fairly confident and hopeful that she was the right dog for us. Our feelings were confirmed when we met her, fell in love, and brought her home that very afternoon. I like to think—nay, I know—that we were meant to have her, and her us.

Our first couple of weeks with Freya were a little rough. Everything we ever knew about our day-to-day turned upside-down and was a stark reality check for what having a newborn would be like. For a 10-week-old puppy being brought into a brand new home with new people and new smells (and none of them being her sister, mother or anything else she’d ever known) it must have been scary, unfamiliar and overwhelming—but she connected with us, and us with her, straight away, and if it weren’t for that it would have been a lot harder. J and I have only just begun to get a full night’s sleep once again, but we truly did hit the puppy jackpot with her (ask me about this again in 6 months when she is at the peak of her teething and potential teenage rebellion phase).

We are so excited to be journeying into the new year with her in our life. She is already so smart and her true personality is coming through now that she is settling in (often calm, often playful but definitely stubborn and full of attitude). We can’t wait for the summer, when she’ll be fully grown and ready to join us on our mountain adventures.

Photos below taken by our dear friend Brittany Esther, four days before Christmas—in a house we are still part of the way through renovating, a project now put on pause as we help Freya get settled into her new life with us.