We were those people, creepily lurking at the dog park and playing with everyone else’s dogs, trying to ignore all the weird stares when we finally left without a dog of our own. Whenever we drove to dinner, we would compulsively stop at the local pet shelter, just to say hi to some furry friends. Around the time we attempted to take the cat for a walk–which resulted in her using a duck-and-backflip menuever to escape her harness before tearing back toward our apartment building and attempting to throw her body through the glass window–we finally accepted the inevitable: it was time to start looking for a dog.

Tullamore came to us through an extraordinary amount of luck. We fell in love with the Boxers after picking up a book about the breed and reading it cover-to-cover the same day. We started scouring pet sites online, and within a week, we found a woman with a male brindle boxer for sale. We contacted her, had a great conversation about what kind of pet owners we wanted to be, and were told that we were first in line. She texted pictures of an adorable little boxer puppy, and we eagerly tried to set a date to pay some kind of deposit. We were so, so lucky that she continually flaked out every time we tried to set a time to meet the puppy and pay for the little guy. Retrospectively, we should have gotten skeptical as she continued to flake out, go dark for days, and reveal more and more information when she did finally get in touch (for example, that the puppy was not with the mother for the first 8 weeks, and would be staying with a vet instead). We just kept looking at his little picture and feeling like we would do anything to adopt him.

Three weeks later, she told us we could finally come pick him up that Saturday. Even though I was going to be out of town and Jared would be alone for the first weekend with the puppy, we were so excited that we felt we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Then, on Saturday, she suddenly informed us that the vet was keeping the dog, and that she was somehow powerless in this situation. We were shocked. She said she felt terrible and said that we could adopt the puppy she had planned to keep for herself, another brindle male, and that she would bring him to our apartment. First she said she was a half an hour late; she stopped responding once she was an hour late. Hours later, she started sending a plethora of incoherent texts, some promising that she would bring us a puppy. But by that time, we had an apartment totally ready for a puppy–blankets in the crate, toys ready, puppy food and treats on the shelves–and had to admit to ourselves that there was no way we could trust this woman to follow through on her word.

We were heartbroken.

Almost out of habit, I checked one of the pet-finder websites when I woke up the next morning, one last time. And there at the top of the page, only 8 minutes old, was an ad for boxer puppies ready to be adopted from Jenna’s Kennel. I followed the link to the kennel’s Facebook page and found tons of posts by happy adopters, sharing pictures of their grown dogs; the kennel owner commented on all of them, saying how happy she was to see her puppies in good homes. She had also posted pictures of the new boxer litter; right in the middle of the picture was an adorable little brindle male boxer. We called the kennel owner, explained that we were two hours away, and asked if there was any way to hold the brindle male until Jared arrived. Two hours later, as the puppy ran up with a wiggling butt and sat right at Jared’s feet, there was no question that this was the puppy we were meant to have.

So begins our amazing story with Tully (short for Mr. Tullamore Dew), our brindle boxer puppy. We want to use this blog to share what it’s like raising this little guy with any other prospective puppy-owners, soon-to-be puppy-owners, or pet lovers that just want to read about an adorable boxer puppy. We are by no means pet-experts; we are just dog-lovers, learning our way through Tully’s puppyhood. We will do our best to share what has worked training wise and what hasn’t, catalog his progress as he goes from puppyhood to a full-grown 80-ish-pound lap dog, and post as many adorable photos as possible.

If you have any boxer puppy stories of your own, please share!!