toby

today is toby’s gotcha day!!

on this day 5 years ago, we called up my brother in law to ask him to drive us 30min outside of the city to meet this lady bev in the parking lot of a petsmart to pick up this dog we’d never met before

these were the only photos we had seen of him

we had no idea if he was tiny dog or if he had the largest food bowl i’d ever seen

turns out he was 29lbs and that was just a gigantic bowl

experimenting @rehash // aka @ddwchen everywhere else // treegirl.substack.com // come hang /rehash /tobythecowdog

when we met him in the parking lot, he was so scared he just laid in the grass paralyzed in fear

finally i picked him up to put him in the car so we could leave and he peed on me

we had done so much research on crate training but turns out we couldn’t get him out of his crate

he was so scared of everything and his crate was the only spot he felt safe i guess 

this went on for about a week

the first few days we would have to carry him out of the building, put him on grass, and he’d just lay there paralyzed in fear and we would just sit there with him for an hour letting him get acclimated to the outside world

we did a tonnnn of confidence building work with him over the years and even though he’s always going to be a bit timid by nature, slowly but surely he’s grown to be quite a confident dog, at least in the areas he needs to be

today i’m able to take him just about anywhere and do just about anything and everything with him, including going to restaurants, cafes, hiking, running, skiing, traveling 

i never thought about past or future lives before i got him but truly feel like toby and i knew each other from a past life. the connection we have is too strong for us to have just met 5 years ago 

he’s my soul dog and i love him so much 💙