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“To the internet!” Emma said, raising her hand as if she had a saber and was charging into battle.

“You look up potty training, I’ll look up how to keep him from chewing on everything.”

“Deal,” Emma said.

Vegas chomped on a squeaky toy, as if agreeing with us.

What had we gotten ourselves into?

Six

Afew hours (and usedpee pads) later, we had to decide what to do with Vegas while we slept.

“If we let him sleep in our beds, then he’s going to pee in them, I hope you know that,” Emma said. She was being the mean mom again.

“But if we leave him out here by himself, he’ll be sad and lonely. We can’t do that to him. It’s his first night.” I had Vegas in my lap and he was asleep again. I’d taken him out of the little pen and brought him to sit on the couch with us after he’d given me one too many looks of sadness from puppy jail.

“Okay, so what are we going to do? Sleep in the puppy pen?” She said it like she was joking.

“Perfect! Just for tonight. We can start training him tomorrow. You have all the instructions.” She’d already made a bulleted list of all the steps and printed it out. We were going to start tonight because neither of us wanted to be cleaning up wee-wee pads forever. As soon as he woke up, we were going to take him outside and wait for him to do his thing, then reward.

As if he’d heard me, Vegas lifted his head and stared at Emma before getting up and going over to her.

“Time to go outside, sweet boy. Do you want to come with me?” she asked me.

“Of course I do. You’re not in this alone. I can be responsible too,” I said, a little defensive.

“No, I know. We’re in this together, because I’m not raising this boy on my own.” I laughed at how much she sounded like a mother just then.

“I’m not leaving you, or our baby. Am I?” I said to Vegas, who licked my hand. Emma snapped a leash on his new collar (we still needed tags with our numbers on them), and we took him outside and down the sidewalk.

“Okay, now we wait,” Emma said as Vegas went wild sniffing everything and wiggling all over the place, running away and then coming back to check if we were still there.

It only took ten minutes, but he did his business and then was properly rewarded and told what an incredible, handsome, genius boy he was, along with a treat that he munched on before we went inside.

“Good job,” I said, high-fiving Emma.