Stanley the Dog

This is the story of how Stanley dog came to join our household.  You should know right off, that we would have never named a dog Stanley, seeing as my Grandpa and uncle are both named Stanley, and it’s strange that we ended up finding out the name of a stray dog we found, but we did.  And once you know a dogs name, you can’t really call him anything else.  It was a Sunday afternoon when we heard Stanley barking in our yard.  We shouldn’t have been there to hear him, since it was the time we would normally be at church, but  we were sick and had spent the day lying around in bed.  After hearing dogs barking for a while (which was unusual for our house), we looked outside to see what dogs were barking, and we saw a small yellow dog in our yard barking by the fence barking at our neighbors dog.  We decided to go out to investigate, and our neighbor said that he had been trying to catch the dog all morning to see if he had a tag, but every time he got close to him, he would run away.  So Jamison and I followed him into the backyard, and he ran up onto our deck, but then he stayed there and let me come close to him.  I was able to catch him, and brought him up and put him in the garage.  Since it was Sunday, none of the animal services locations were open, so I figured we’d have to keep him at our house till the next day, and then go drop him off.  Within an hour the kids had brought him in the house, which then made me decide I’d better give the dirty wet dog a bath if he was going to be roaming around the house.  We were already gonners.  The next day we took him to the vet for them to check for a micro chip, and he had one.  So then we really thought he would be back with his owners by the end of the day.  But when they checked the info on the micro chip, the owners never registered their information, but the vets info was there.  So I called there, and they called the owners that had inserted the micro chip and were told by them that they had given the dog away a year ago.  But we did find out that the dog that we wanted to name Oscar, was named Stanley of all things!  I decided that if he didn’t really respond to Stanley, we would just change his name.  Well you can guess how that turned out.  By then Jamison had bonded forever with the dog, and his dad didn’t have the heart to tell him he had to get rid of him.  I had been trying to convince Brandon that Jamison needed a dog since he was 4 years old.  So I consider it a miracle that this little dog was sent straight to our family, and wouldn’t let any one catch him until it was us.