Say Hello to Maggie!

We’ve added a family member! Say hello to Maggie! Maggie (Magnolia) Grace is a two and a half month F1b Golden Doodle who we picked up about 2 weeks ago. She is smart and full of energy as most puppies are.

Some Backstory

We have been planning to get a dog for several years now. Our last dog, a Cocker Spaniel named Jax, passed away almost 5 years ago. At that time we were working a two year plan we had to get our old house ready to be put on the market. We knew that we ultimately hoped to build a house, but build or buy we decided we shouldn’t get another dog until we were settled in a new home.

Jax was our last pet so it would mean selling the house and moving would be much less complicated, especially as it turned out where we needed to live in a temporary apartment while our house was built. It was hard enough to find a short term lease for a not disgusting apartment for a reasonable rent. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to find a place with all that AND accepted pets….especially for a larger dog. In the end it definitely was the right decision to wait.

But What Kind of Dog?

My husband and son had been wanting a specific kind of dog. I have had a mix of that dog before and they are super smart, trainable dogs and work well for guard dogs and family dogs, but I really wanted a cuddly fuzzball of a dog and that breed was not it. So I started thinking about a year ago or so, “What if we got two dogs at the same time? The one my husband and son wanted and maybe one that I want.” Honestly at that time I didn’t even know for certain what I wanted, just some general ideas.

I also thought it would be great to get them around the same time so that they could grow up together and have a playmate. I figured this would take out some of the territorial issues that were possible if we decided to get the 2nd dog later on down the line. I ran this idea past Richard and he was all for it. So then I went to do the research to figure out exactly what kind of dog I wanted.

First I knew I wanted a bigger dog, because the other dog would be a big dog, and in general I am not a fan of small yappy dogs. No offense to all of you with small dogs, but our Cocker Spaniel was about as small as either one of us have ever wanted. We both primarily grew up with bigger dogs so I am sure that is part of our preference and in general I can’t stand high pitch sounds and the thought of a high pitched yappy dog is headache inducing.

It didn’t take long for me to find and settle on a Golden Doodle. I’d always loved the size, coloring and temperament of Golden Retrievers, but not so much their long straight hair. I like the curly hair of poodles, but not some of their other characteristics, but when I found Golden Doodles it seemed like the best of both worlds.

An Unexpected Find

So I went looking for puppies of the two breeds we wanted. We wanted to get them for my son’s birthday as his major birthday gift. We had been promising him for the last 3 years that once we were in the new house and had established grass (I didn’t want mud being drug all over our new house), we would get a puppy. That got delayed because of Richard’s layoff as we didn’t know what would happen and didn’t feel right about getting the dog with so much ambiguity hanging over our heads.

What I found when I first started searching for a Golden Doodle was that they were hard to come by with all of the pandemic stuff going on. So many people bought or adopted dogs this year while their families were stuck at home without much to do. This has left a soaring dog market and the ones that I did find were in the range of over $3,000! There was no way I could justify paying that for a dog so I literally gave up hope that we’d get the Golden Doodle….right now or maybe ever. I was pretty defeated and just focused on finding the other puppy.

Strangely enough though while I was searching on Facebook for the entirely different breed of dog, at the bottom of the first page of results I came across a Golden Doodle breeder that was less than an hour and a half away. In addition, the breeder had a large litter of puppies 4 weeks prior! It felt meant to be so I quickly messaged the lady to find out availability and price and learned her price was less than half of the cheapest breeder I had found while doing my research. We researched her, paid the deposit and signed a contract all within hours of finding her.

Maggie

So here is what our little girl looked like when we got our first pictures of her at 4 weeks. Originally we thought we would probably end up with the very last girl and not get to pick, but in the end we got a pick of two girls and chose this one. Isn’t she adorable?!

And here she is when we picked her up at 8 weeks! The woman who breeds them has a small business and breeds ethically. They live in the country and only have a total of 4 dogs. Maggie is an F1b Golden Doodle which means her parents were a Golden Doodle mixed with a Poodle. This means she’s likely to be curlier and have more traits of poodles, like less shedding and hypoallergenic, but there is no guarantee of these traits. She is standard size Golden Doodle, so she should end up somewhere in the 45-70lb range.

We are bonding with our cute, ornery ball of fluff! It’s been so long since we had a puppy that we have forgotten a bit of what it can be like. In many ways it’s like having a newborn baby and toddler all in one. She gets into trouble being curious, has a bit of biting issue because she’s teething, doesn’t always sleep through the night and requires potty training and picking up after messes since she doesn’t wear a diaper like a baby would. 🤣 But we love her and are enjoying her even if we are exhausted.