Entrant's Name
Ashley

A little about me...
We adopted our sweet pittie princess, who goes by Abbie, about four years ago from IAR. She was about a year old at the time and had been in foster care with Evelyn Lilly for ~6 months. She was found wandering the streets of Orange County with a bad UTI. It was ultimately resolved by emergency surgery to remove bladder stone the size of a golf ball. She must have been in so much pain and it hurts to think about. Other than that we can only speculate about her early life, and I wonder if it influenced her initially shy personality. You have to earn Abbie’s trust , but once you do she becomes an absolute Velcro-dog. When we met her she was unsure and shy, but had these random bursts of joy and silliness when playing, almost as if she forgot about being on alert. We adopted her. Slowly over a few months , those bursts of joy became longer as she came out of her shell. Her silly personality came to surface. She began to trust our friends, and she became essentially soul-bonded with me over many months; that sounds weird, but I am truly convinced she KNOWS how I am feeling, and vice versa. This photo is one of her silly bursts of energy in the early days, maybe a few months after adopting her. I’m sharing because 1) it’s such a funny photo and2) it means so much to me and my husband; it reminds us how exciting it was to experience a shy dog come out of her shell.