Gatsby's Here!!

Yay!! I got a call this morning that they were able to do his surgery yesterday, so he was available to come home today. He's all up to date on his shots now and the animal shelter gave him a little microchip. They also removed the dewclaws that were on his hind legs.

Brian and I picked him up around 6:30 p.m. and he's been really awesome ever since. He was very, very, very excited to see us and did a lot of running around in the parking lot at the animal shelter. He saw a couple dogs out there and basically just sniffed them out. No barking or growling and he didn't show his teeth.

He was all over the place in the car and very, very excited. He stayed in the back, but he did demonstrate a behavior that we're now working hard to nip in the bud. We took his bed with us for him to have in the car and once he saw it he started humping it like crazy!

When we got home, we took him on a walk to explore our yard and then eventually brought him inside on the leash and took him around to show him the place. After he calmed down a bit, we took him off the leash and we've let him run around without it ever since. He won't go off away from us and he's following me around everywhere :-) We played with him for a bit and then Brian went to pick up dinner from Applebees. After he left, I sat down to read the paperwork we got from the animal shelter and he crawled up on the couch beside me and took a nap. When Brian got back, we ate our dinner and pretty much ignored him so that he wouldn't beg for food. He basically just walked around the table a couple of times and then chilled at his food bowl and drank a lot of water. We gave him some food and he's been eating it a little at a time.

We've pretty much just been chilling since dinner and Gatsby has been doing the same. We've taken him outside twice since we brought him home and he's really liking his exploration of our cul-de-sac and empty lots. :-)

He hasn't gone to the bathroom inside at all and the only issue has been that he likes to hump the pillows. So we've just taken them away and given him a toy for his aggression. The first toy we gave him was a cute little turtle...but evidently it wasn't really the right one for him because he chewed up the little turtle arms in about an hour. So now he has a new (stronger!) toy and a tennis ball and he's been really happy with those.

Currently, he's taking a nap between us on the floor. On Saturday, he has an appointment with the vet (free of charge from the animal shelter) to get his routine checkup.

Yay for good dogs! (But, if anyone has any good tips to eliminate the humping, let us know!)

We haven't taken a ton of pictures tonight, but I added the ones that we took to our Gatsby album:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lsleblanc82/Gatsby

He's a very happy dog!