Read Joie and Jeremy’s story on how they fell in love and adopted Olly.
It started with helping to care for our neighbour’s GR, Sydney for a few days. She is 13yrs old and was home alone because the grandfather of the family had passed away. While the entire family was occupied with the sad occasion, we took over the feeding and caring for Sydney. This was when a certain connection was established and triggered a thought if we are ready to have a dog ourselves.
The thought lingered on while we continued with our daily lives. It was one of the weekend when we met up with some friends that we heard about the adoption option. Coincidentally when we check, we found out about the SOSD adoption drive at Tanjong Pagar Tower which was going to happen on the 5th September 2018. It was that Sunday we went to check out the dogs and took the chance to interact with their fosterer to know the dogs better. One of the volunteer, Jiayi was very helpful and informative about the mission of SOSD. We were impressed with her sharing about the SOSD activities to save our street dogs. The system that was put in place by SOSD to bring in the dogs, shelter them, nurture them and eventually identify a good home for them is amazing. It set upon us that this is a good cause and we want to be part of this. It is so much more meaningful than buying a dog.
This is when we were introduced to Olly; a 8 month old, brown short coat mongrel who is ever-energetic and super sociable. We observed him from afar and his body language shows that he looks like a nice and eager dog. We went over to Olly and spoke to his fosterers, Huijin and Junwen to find out more about Olly. True to our observation, he is described by his fosterer to be energetic, sociable, playful and a super glutton for food. Again, this impressed us that the fosterer is able to articulate the personality of the dogs. It really allow us to make a good assessment about our compatibility. We also tried out walking Olly then but he was super distracted especially with all the crowd that day! We had fun anyhow and made a decision to arrange visit to the forsterer’s house to see him again and explore the connection with him.
That week happened to be the National Day week. So on 9th August, we went to the visit Olly and to further know him in his homeground. After an hour, we invited the fosterers and Olly to our place to see how he would fit in. It was also a chance to have Olly introduced to the rest of our family members to be sure that everyone is comfortable. This is a family decision to adopt a dog as it requires everyone in the household to accept this new member as well as to care for this dog. He is perpetually a 2yr old toddler!
Finally, we arranged a homestay with Olly the following Saturday. The first homestay morning happened to be a Sunday where everyone is at home, so we brought him to East Coast Park and ended up walking for 5km. It was not an easy walk. He is distracted and gets hyper whenever there a dog is nearby. The most annoying behaviour about him was his appetite for anything that interest him on the walk. He is like a 4-legged rubbish vacuum cleaner. He kept pulling and tugging during the 5km in East Coast Park to eventually see him exhausted and totally knocked out in the car on the way home. Zzzzz….
Now one month has passed and it has been a very exciting, tiring but rewarding experience. Adopting Olly has definitely made our family more cohesive as everyone including the kids take up their responsibility to walk,feed,shower and pick up the poop.
Having Olly around also keeps us off the phone and spend more time outdoors.
Currently we are continuing to help Olly become a better family member by laying ground rules in the family and setting a routine for him as this is going to be a life long relationship between us.
