Today I’m going to share something a bit different than the home decor/DIY posts I’ve been sharing recently… Brooke’s adoption story! If anything, I love to have these posts for me and Stephen to look back on to remember these sweet (and somewhat funny) stories.

Two Saturday’s ago we went to the local Sweet Potato Festival. Stephen had been talking about going to this for months since he went to one when he lived in Mississippi and loved it. He was so excited for it! I will say though, when we got there we were pretty underwhelmed with the amount of sweet potato options they had. It was kind of a bummer but it’s okay! It ended up being a great day!

We walked around for a bit and then waited in line to get some BBQ. After we sat down and ate on the grass together, we decided it was time to find us some sweet potato pie so we started walking around. Stephen spotted a tent that had homemade dog treats but before we could even walk there, I spotted the humane society tent next to it with the dogs…

There was this little little puppy (she looks bigger in photos for some reason! She was only 10 pounds soaking wet!) walking around in a pen area named Fawn. We started petting her and before long, she was in my arms. For the next two hours we played with her and watched her interact with dozens of little kids and other puppies. She was extremely playful and loving. I think the moment when I thought, “Shoot… Are we getting another puppy?” is when she ran up to another dog, hit it, and ran away as if she was ready to wrestle. It was so funny and something we knew Adi would love because she constantly would come up to us and “bite” our legs to try to get us to play with her. We had been talking about getting another dog for months and months now because we knew Adi needed a buddy to play with so when we were playing with that little puppy, Stephen and I were constantly thinking about whether or not the time had arrived to bring another pup home.

At the end of the two hours I sat down with little Fawn in my lap and she fell right to sleep. She was so exhausted. Stephen and I sat there asking each other over and over again, “Do we do it??” Our biggest concern was that Adi had her ACL surgery a couple of months prior and we didn’t want to put that in jeopardy. After a while though, Stephen looked at me and said, “I’m going to get the adoption form.” I was really glad he made the decision considering Adi was a complete surprise for him.

When Stephen was filling out the form we found out that there was a secret Santa in the area paying for all adoptions (including microchip, spay/neuter, and vaccines) until Christmas. We didn’t have to pay a single cent for little Brooke. I was somewhat in shock by this generous donor. What a blessing! I told Stephen that someday when we have a lot of money saved up, we’re going to do the exact same thing.

The entire car ride home we were brainstorming names. We knew that we wanted it to go along with our “running shoe theme” (Adi’s name is short for ‘Adi’ Dassler, the founder of ADIDAS, one of our favorite running shoe brands) but we quickly learned that most running shoes have masculine names (for example, if it was a boy we would’ve named him Newt, short for Newton!). We made it home and still hadn’t named her but eventually we said to each other, “Should we just go with Brooke?” and that was that.

As for how Adi reacted and plays with her… She was smitten and still is! Any time they’re out of the crate (we crate them while at work mainly because of Adi’s knee), they’re playing. They’ll play all night long until the minute they go to sleep at night. It’s so entertaining to watch and ironically enough, it allows for us to get more work done because they just bother each other instead of nagging for us to play with them. HA! We’re really happy they have each other now.

I mentioned before that we were concerned about Adi’s knee post-surgery and in general, she’s doing really well. She slipped once last week while Brooke and her were running around on our slippery floors and it freaked me out terribly but she was acting completely normal again within a few minutes. I think because of that little incident she’s become pretty cognizant of where she’s running and she goes a lot slower which I’m so thankful for.

We went to the Sweet Potato Festival on the hunt for a great pie and left with a puppy! We can’t complain. 😉 She’s pretty darn cute. Thanks for all of the love on our photo when we shared about Brooke joining our crew! We feel really blessed.