Picking out our fur baby

Today I am going to tell you about my search for our first English Bulldog. Like I said in a previous blog, my husband and I thought long and hard about if we were ready to get a puppy. When we finally decided to get one that is when the work began. 

We would search on the internet every night and I'm not going to lie it was frustrating some nights. On this one night we found one woman selling a blue dapple female English Bulldog for $500 and we fell in love with her. The only problem was she would only send us the same couple of pictures and she refused to send videos. She also lived in a different state so she wanted all of the funds cash apped to her that night. Well I did a little bit of research and found out that it is hard to find a  blue dapple under $2000. So that was a red flag. So I searched the image on the internet (I explain how to do this in my Take the fear out of shopping blog) I found that same picture all over the internet. It was a professional photo taken of someone else's puppy. So disappointed but relieved we didn't give her any money we blocked her and kept searching. Probably about a week later my husband came home from work and told me he found a breeder only a few towns over from us. We start messaging her and at that time she didn't have any puppies available but her girl was about to have some in a couple of weeks. We were beyond excited! Then the puppies came, but we did set up some rules that we wanted to make sure we went by. 

Rule number one: We wanted a female.

Rule number two: We wanted to make sure her Dam and Sire didn't have any serious health conditions. 

Rule number three: We wanted to make sure that the breeder does a puppy wellness check. 

Rule number four: We wanted to go see the puppy and see what kind of condition the breeder kept her dogs in. 

Step number four was very important to us. We didn't want to buy from someone that just uses their dogs as money machines. Making them live in horrible conditions. 

We messaged the breeder everyday and she was wonderful. She answered any questions or concerns I had. She passed rules one through three now since the puppies had arrived it was time to see if she would pass rule number four. She had already sent us pictures of the puppies and my husband had his pick and I had mine. We went on a Friday night after work. I was so excited and on pins and niddles all day. Just watching the clock. Finally the time came. We showed up at the breeders house. We didn't even want to look at the puppies yet we want to look at the breeders own dogs. 

Once we got in to her living room she had one dog laying on the couch. Her husband was watching a football game with the other dog in his lap and the puppies were in their own little bed on the floor. Well she passed rule number four! Nervously we go over to the puppies my husband handed me his pick and he grabbed my pick. Well after loving on them for a while I offered my husband's pick to him but he didn't want to take her. His mind was made up. My pick was the puppy for us. We put down a deposit to hold her and the breeder gave us a contract that she and we had to sign. In this contract it stated that deposit was not refundable because it went to the vet bills for that puppy but if something were to happen to that puppy (when puppies are that small you just never know) our deposit would go to a different puppy of our choosing either in that litter or a future litter. We eventually had to leave that night. The puppy was still to little for us to take her home so we still had to wait. But we had found her! We had found our new fur baby!