I have a new family member, but she’s definitely not my running buddy yet.

This is Emmie… technically her name is Emerald Venom. Apparently, dogs that are AKC registered must have at least two names. (She has pedigree… her “ancestors” have some super long and strange names.) The name Emerald came about because our last dog was a boxer named Jade, and my kiddo decided that all future pets shall be named after gemstones.

Emmie is a boxer. Her coloring is considered flashy brindle, black mask. Flashy because the white color comes up around her neck and face. She is NOT a black boxer, anyone who says they have black boxers is wrong. That is not a term recognized by official organizations. (But in my regular lay-person terminology she is a black-and-white boxer.) I never knew there was so much dog formality.

Because she is only 11 weeks old right now, she can only go on short walks. She is a large breed dog, so technically she shouldn’t start running with me until she is 12-18 months old to protect her bones and joints and plates and stuff while they’re growing so quickly. So right now, she goes on 5-10 minute walks with me. She has terrible leash skills right now anyway, we wouldn’t last much longer than that.

She has also managed to completely derail running for me this month. Right now, I’m at the point where I feel like puppies should come with a SCAM warning.

WARNING! This creature is super cute and you will fall in love with it immediately. But don’t be fooled… It will pee or poop in the house, it will find anything and everything to chew on and most of it is something you do not want her to be chewing on. Feet and ankles… she loves chewing on those. Your feet and ankles. It will hurt. She needs to go out to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so you will now embark on weeks of broken sleep. You cannot take your eyes off her for a minute else she will destroy something. You have been warned… proceed with caution!

We’re trying to use a crate. She has gotten to the point where she doesn’t fight going in the crate at night to sleep… but she does NOT like being in the crate during the day. Especially if she knows someone is in the house with her. I’ve tried to go get on the treadmill or the bike during the day, leaving her in the crate so I can exercise, but it’s not very beneficial because my watch keeps telling me my heart rate is spiking as I listen to her cry. And 98.7% of the dog care seems to fall on me, because I am the poor unfortunate soul who works from home.

And I haven’t gone running outside too much because of something that I keep meaning to post about, but for right now we’ll say I don’t run outside much because of 2022. That’s sufficiently vague, right? But if I go running outside, at least I wouldn’t hear her crying in the crate. But it’s been cold and windy and rainy a lot since we brought her home. Also, I’ll still have to come home and get her out of the crate when she will be all wet from crying and stress-sweating from her paws and she is all shaky. That hurts my soul.

There’s a part of me that always thought dog strollers were ridiculous… but right now, it’s kind of tempting so I could go on a walk with her. But she’s also pretty rambunctious and would probably just jump out of a stroller. She’s grown 3-4 pounds in the 3 weeks I’ve had her. She will not be stroller-sized for long, so having a dog stroller would be a VERY short window of opportunity.

Hopefully, she will run with me in the future. And hopefully, I will run outside again on a regular basis. I don’t want her to run on the treadmill with me, that’s just weird. She can have her own time on the treadmill. (I don’t know how to train a dog to run on a treadmill.)

We did start some social media accounts for her. There are several reasons behind this choice:

1. I can share her adorableness with the world.
2. I can make some other platform host all videos of her and not fill up my storage. (Assuming YouTube doesn’t disappear before I die.)
3. My kiddo can help post things and learn a little more about social media posting in a safer environment than posting about herself.
4. Trying to teach the dog computer literacy. She is failing so far. No opposable thumbs.

So follow along, please! Emerald Venom the Boxer on Instagram and YouTube

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a nap. Oh wait… that won’t happen. I need to go play tug-of-rope with a crazy bitey puppy and hold her on my lap while I try to have meetings with colleagues!