There’s a new canine intern in the studio and her name is Olive.

If you’ve been around my newsletter or blog, you have probably seen Stanley, our beloved big dopey yellow lab. Tragically, we lost him in December to a rare complication of Lyme disease called Lyme nephritis. By the time we figured it out with the vet team, he was already in kidney failure. He had been vaccinated, but sadly, vaccines are amazing but not 100% effective and labradors are particularly succeptible to this horrible variation. We miss him like crazy.

I hinted about Olive in my last blog post. We had a really rough December here. Just after the holidays we also lost two very close family members and January was a blur of family meetings, crying, and travel. We decided that our house just really seemed sad and broken without a dog, so we started looking for Olive. My husband and I were secretly both looking at rescue sites without telling each other.

Olive came from Kentucky as a tiny puppy. The story we heard is that she was dumped at a month old with the 7 other puppies in her litter at an animal shelter by an old guy who said “You better take em or I’m gunna drown em”. Her paperwork says she’s a spaniel mix and she’ll be 3 months old in just a few days. She was just 3.5 lbs when she came to live with her foster family in MN. We found her through Safehands Rescue. I didn’t know anything about them before, but the social media algorithms saw me looking for puppy things and flooded my feed with little furry faces. She and two of her siblings lived for about 6 weeks with a sweet foster family. She’s not quite 12 lbs now (which is a big change from Stanley who was 104 lbs!) Puppies are a crazy amount of work so we are so grateful to her foster family who took such good care of her. Safehands Rescue was so easy to work with and I appreciate the care they take in making sure that their fosters find the right homes.

Olive is short for Olivine Pegmatite. Our dogs always have names with a story. Those are both minerals in honor of my father-in-law who passed away in January. He was a geology professor and loved dogs, so we know he would have loved her. Winter is challenging for all kinds of puppy socializing things so we are trying to think of creative errands to take her along. Yesterday she went to the post office and said hi to all the people in line. She’s already helping out in the studio by finding every tiny piece of paper on the floor to chomp. Expect more puppy art coming soon!