Feeling Blue

Blue was my eighth foster dog and the absolute hardest to let go. When a foster goes to their new forever home I usually feel a little sad but it passes. It’s been about four months now since he left us and I still miss him. Even though I know he’s being loved in his new home it still hurts that he’s not with us anymore.

Blue is a 12 year old Maltese mix that we had with us for about four months – much longer than any other dog we’ve fostered. His advanced age and complete blindness made him less desirable to most adopters.

He had a few meet and greets before one of them adopted him. It was crazy to me that these people would pass on Blue – though he did pee on one of them. I guess I can’t blame her too much for passing…

Blue settled into our little family so quickly – Ranger and Grizzly took to him faster than any other foster dog. We took him to the beach with us, a multi-state road trip in our trailer (he did perfectly), and hikes. He very quickly felt like one of the family.

I created a video to help show off his good qualities – hoping he’d be adopted before I got too attached.

We didn’t keep Blue – even though we wanted to – for two reasons. One – if we adopted him we would have to stop fostering. Three dogs is the max number of dogs we can handle. Two – he just couldn’t keep up with our dogs. I knew we’d end up having to leave him behind on our trips and that wouldn’t be fair to him – plus I know it’d put a damper on any trip we went on.

He was incredibly slow when hiking – so much so that the few times we tried to hike with him I ended up caring him:

At 19 pounds he wasn’t terribly heavy, but carrying him still tired me out and wasn’t something I could do for long hikes. I really wanted to see if we could make something work, so I did what I never, ever thought I would do: I bought a dog backpack.

My husband vetoed it the second he saw it on me. It was also pretty uncomfortable – though Blue didn’t seem to mind it.

Eventually he was adopted and I had to say goodbye – it was really difficult. Even writing this now, months after he left, I feel sad.

People always ask me if it’s hard to let foster dogs go – and in the past I’ve always been able to say it’s not that bad. I bounce back pretty quickly.

Well, not this time.