EDIT: I don’t care to hear your opinion of breeders, I don’t even know if it was a breeder, it was an ad in the paper for a litter of black pug puppies, the only ones we could find in Nashville or any surrounding areas and we were going to adopt from the Music City Pug Rescue (which we have generously donated to before) and they took about two months to get back to us, at which time they told us they did not have any more puppies up for adoption. My mom has been through hell and back in the past six months (if you’ve bothered to read anything about our family other than this post, you would know) and all we wanted to do was get her a gift that would bring her joy. In all fairness, if an animal needs a home does it really matter? We have previously gotten three dogs from the Humane Society and they were amazing animals, I feel the Humane Society is a great organization and I am all for adopting from any kind of shelters and rescues, and if they had any purebred pugs (we wanted to try a purebred pug because Milo was a mix and he had many health problems and had a fabulous personality, we wanted something similar but not the same). I don’t want sympathy, I was sharing something amusing that happened and warning people about it.

I’m amazed that I still haven’t blogged about one of the most important events in the past month and a half. For an early mother’s day present we found a pug puppy for my mom, and my sister paid for part of the cost.


We named him Buster after the character from the TV series Arrested Development. Honestly, we picked the name before we even met him, but it fits his personality just right. It’s been 6 months since Milo died and we felt that it was the right time to get another dog. My mom thought about naming the new puppy Milo, but I was afraid that’d be too big of shoes to fill for the new puppy. And Buster is a lot different than Milo was as a puppy. Buster is excited all the time. He loves to run, though he runs like a windup toy. He loves to play and chew on your fingers. He’s always trying something new, and hates to go to sleep. Milo was a much more relaxed puppy, he slept most of the time and played only some of the time, with Buster it is the other way around.

When Buster first came home he was small. Very, very small. He didn’t weigh more than a pound, and could fit in one hand. The way the woman (in the above picture she’s the one in the gray blue shirt) we got it from was feeding Buster was by crushing up puppy chow into crumbs. Every time Buster would eat he would end up kind of crying, and with his powdery food in his little flat nose. We started adding water to regular puppy chow and heating it up in the microwave, before we fed him with a spoon. My mom says that for the first few days she wasn’t sure he was going to make it, he was so small and scruffy. But within a week he gained more than two pounds and started thriving–except for one thing.

The mites. Mites are microscopic little bastard parasites that burrow into your skin, causing a small bump that looks like a small mosquito bite. They itch worse than most anything I’ve ever felt, and they multiply and make you feel like you’re a leper. You don’t want to leave the house because you look like a crack whore and you’re scratching like one too. We were unaware of Buster’s mites, the woman we got him from told us the vet they’d seen the day before said it was a rash (I’m sure she was lying, no vet couldn’t tell that was mites) and here’s some antibiotics to give him twice a day. The poor puppy was covered in scabs and he had bald spots from scratching so much. My sister, my mom and I all got the mites, and so did my puppy Rosie. We had to take Buster to the vet’s about two or three times and that plus all the medication for preventing our other dogs from getting the mites cost more than $250 (it could’ve been worse had we not gone to .)

We also had to treat our mites with some prescription heavy duty cream. But the thing was, if we applied it and then just chilled at home amongst the mite infested furniture and linens then we’d be wasting our time. We had to pack up all of our clothes and sheets that were worn and used in the past two weeks, go to Wal-Mart, get a full two outfits, keep those separated from the rest of our clothes and linens, get a hotel room, take a thorough shower, apply the cream, change into the new outfits, only handle the dogs with gloves and a button down shirt on, and then wash all of our clothes and linens at the laundromat while my brother bug bombed the house and sprayed stuff on the carpets and furniture. Anything we didn’t wash or treat we had to stay away from for at least several days to make sure the mites died (they can’t last too long without a host).

All in all, the medicine, the clothes, the hotel room, the pets’ medications cost more than $500. Be ye not stupid such as us, check out your breeder and your dog beforehand. Don’t EVER take their word for it.

Oh and now that the mites are finally gone, the scabs all healed up, the skin back to normal, our dogs have fleas.