Ginger Ann

Here is an update for you all on Ginger Ann. We have shortened her name to Ginger, but we call her GinGin, wiggle butt and sweetie. We have had her for just over 3 months and we couldn’t love her more. This has been quite a learning experience for us. My other 3 pups I had had since they were 8 weeks old and I never realized how much I really helped to shape their personalities. Ginger came to us quite a loaner, she would sit on her chair all by herself and she seemed quite happy, but this really bothered me. Our other girls are very needed and they want to sit next to and by their mama all the time. I felt that Ginger didn’t like us, but she just needed to learn to trust us and we have given her lots of time, space and attention so that she can see that she is here forever and that we love her very much. She now sits on the couch next to us, she follows us around the house, if we are in the den, she is in the den, if I go into a closet, she will follow us. She knows that we love her and she now wants and can demand attention. At night when we are watching tv if she doesn’t think she is getting enough attention she will crawl under our coffee table and start wagging her tail, she then does this aurrgh sounding thing to get our attention and then she starts dancing around the floor until we get on the floor with her and rub her belly. This is really cute. She is getting along great with her 2 beagle sisters, and her kitty sister. We only have small problems. Our little Daisy was very close to our Bitzi and since Bitzi has been gone for a year, Daisy has decided that Ginger can take her place, this is really not too good. Daisy would cuddle with Bitzi and lick her on the head. Well when she tries to do this to Ginger, she will growl loudly and actually try to bite her. Poor Daisy bug really gets upset, so we are watchful to see when she tries to go to near and we then separate them. Ginger doesn’t like them in her face, but Daisy doesn’t understand. After Ginger was here for a month we had huge potty problems, she decided that she would rather pee on the dinning room rug then go outside. We put up barriers and started to work with her so that she would know that she needed to go outside. After 2 months, we have now removed the barriers during the day and she is doing really well. The only thing we really worry about is her health. She has allergies really bad, in fact she scratches so much she can cause welts and she chews on her foot so much that she starts to limp. We have her under our doctor’s care and we are working on meds that have helped out tremendously. As we have been working on the allergies, it has come to our attention that she has a heart murmur. On a scale of 1 — 6 hers is about a 2.8. This is really scary to us since our Bitzi had a heart murmur and the last 2 years we had her on all sorts of medicine, special food and many many doctor appts to make sure she wasn’t retaining water. So it was really sad to us to have Ginger with the same problem, but much worse for her age. She is just 9 and Bitzi’s wasn’t this bad until she was 14. Of course our vet assures us that we are the best parents for her since we know what to do and we know all the signs to watch for. He also has said that there is no guarantee that it will ever get any worse. So we are very thankful for our little adopted girl and like I said we have learned so much and she has really made a special impact on our lives. Please thank everyone who helped with our little Ginger and please share the pictures. Thank You, Kim & Rob Brown