1.) You will get attached!! Not just to one but to every single one that you foster, and one day you WILL fall so much in love with one that you simply cannot bear to let them go! If you foster you WILL fail and it's a wonderful thing! :)
2.)Flower gardens that at one time you nurtured and slaved over will at some point be absolutely DEMOLISHED in the blink of an eye. At first you will be FURIOUS but then you'll look over to 3 huge eyed little puppies with leaves hanging out of their mouths looking all innocent and you'll decide that the flowers weren't all that pretty anyway!!
Before
After:
3.) The little guy is always the one you need to watch out for!! Do not, I repeat, DO NOT let that tiny innocent face fool you!!! He's the one that will sneak off and poop in your computer room, and steal food from the other dog's bowls, and then look at you in such a way that you will actually make excuses for everything he'd just done!
4.) Eventually one will come to you so sick that no matter how hard you try you just can't save it. This will be devastating! This will make you question everything you tried to do, you'll ask yourself if you could have done more, if you did something wrong, if you missed something you should have seen. You'll question humanity, God, your vet, and then you'll have to realize that sometimes things just happen. There is no reason, nothing more that could have been done, you did your absolute best and it happened anyway. You have to decide to go through the emotions but get back to saving what lives you can. It's one of the hardest lessons I had to learn and it was with my very first foster puppy.
5.)You will walk into a pet store to simply buy a $20 bag of dog food and walk out of there having spent $170 on treats, toys, bones, and a new crate.. When you get to the car you'll realize you forgot the dog food so you have to go back in. You also realize that you now have to eat ramen noodles for the next two weeks and you're somehow ok with that. :)
6.)You will document and remember every vet visit, their weights, medicine dosages, make schedules and set alarms to make sure they get medicine at the right times. You'll remember who's poo looks like what, who is on which food, who isn't resting well, who is coughing worse, who is coughing less. You will be able to remember every detail of their day to day life, but you will not for the life of you be able to remember if you washed your hair in the shower this morning!!!
7.)You're gonna meet people while fostering that are unlike any you've ever met before! People who don't foster as a hobby or foster one or two at a time, but people who do ALL that they can as often as they can. When they are told something can't happen they MAKE a way for it to happen. People who lose sleep so that they can be there at 5AM to transport animals 600 miles away to give them a better chance at finding families. People who don't think twice about how much room they have in their homes when they decide to take in yet another abused, abandoned, neglected animal. People who work in freezing cold, blistering heat, foul stench, through aches and pains, heartache, and setbacks, because comfort to them is just not as important as saving the lives of these animals. These people will inspire you and support you and when you need them for anything they will step up and be there! You'll find that you haven't just made friends you've joined a family! These are people like Lela Joseph, Jayne Boswell, Pamela Glass, Stephanie Duer, Christy Vaught, and Jennifer Vander Meer, just to name a few!!
Fostering isn't always easy, there are costs both financially and emotionally, but for every negative there are at least 10 positives! All the costs are reimbursed with love, snuggles, puppy breath, games of fetch, belly scratches, goofy antics,big brown eyes,wet noses, slobbery kisses, and the knowledge that you helped make a life better! Saving even one makes it all worth it. :)
