Dear all, Happy New Year! We had such a huge New Year party in Russian way, that it took me some time to recover. According to Chinese Horoscopes, this 2018 is the Year of the Dog. All my family are Big Dog Lovers. I grew up with dogs and I love to have them around. I sincerely think that dogs combined in them all the best humans qualities. For several years we babysit different dogs (I have several posts about it) , but we didn’t had our own. My son begged for that, but with our intensive travel schedule, I was hesitating to have a dog. However, we always keep saying to him “later, one day, we’ll see”. So, after all trials with different kind of friends’ dogs, we finally decided to take our own. We simply ran out of excuses for our son. We came to Atlanta Humane society to find a dog for us. My son saw one, dragged us towards his cage, and we all fell in love with him at first site. Despite the fact he was only 7 months old, he already had a history. He was found as a baby and adopted by someone, when he was 2 month old. However, his “family” returned him when he was 7 months old. The same day we met him. He looked very sad and scared of everything. I had a lot of concerns why his family returned him. Maybe he was not house trained? Maybe aggressive? We didn’t know. I knew it was risky to take him right away, since you can’t return dog again – it would be really cruel. But we followed our instinct and took him with us. We changed his name (it was probably fifth time because we didn’t know his previous name, only Humane society one), bought him toys and bed and took him home…
… It happened 3 years ago. Now, our dog is a spoiled baby. We love him and he is a part of the pack. He knows it. He still have a separation issue, and cry when we leave him even for a ten minutes, but we are working on that. He is our little philosopher, looking at life with his deep dog’s look.
This year is a Year of Dog. I wish you all to be surrounded by people with the best dogs’ qualities: faithfulness, dedication and kindness, by people who love you without any reason, no matter how do you look, and always ready to forgive you. Happy New Year!
Marriage With A Foreign Accent 
Yulia, you have a wonderful blog. I am very fascinated by Russia as I visited there in college. I love Russian authors and I did a tour in Moscow and St. Petersburg of places associated with Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Gogol. I am so glad you are in America sharing your culture with us.
Walker, thank you! I am very pleased you read my blog and enjoyed it. That gives me an inspiration to write more) Today we had a meeting at my neighborhood’s book club and discussed Russian writers. It is great that my American friends and neighbors read and know Russian literature. Thank you again for reading!