I haven’t gone a single year of my life without a pet of some kind.
When I was young, my parents had three dogs and two cats.
The oldest was our german shepard named Magnum, while our youngest was a beagle named Buster. Peanut was the middle dog, a small dachshund. We named our two cats Jessie and Tigger, both of which were rescues. I don’t regret a single part about having five pets at once, although I think I handled it better as a child with few other stressors in my life compared to me as an adult and having my own family to care for. On the flip side of this, how do you continuously deny your kids’ requests for a dog when they have behaved well for years and waited with patience? Eventually I broke down and we went and adopted a corgi named Hazelnut. Before long we had another rescue corgi who we name Buttercup. I love those two dogs to death but they add a lot of extra chores and maintenance around the house. The house breaking took longer than expected, but nowadays they rarely have accidents indoors. More than anything it’s dealing with their fur. It gets literally everywhere despite our best efforts. I keep struggling to get it all out of the carpets with our vacuum and I keep finding it accumulating in our air conditioner filters. I have now started replacing them every two weeks to keep up with the accumulation of dog hair. Having an air return at floor level makes the problem even worse, because at least a ceiling vent would pull in drastically smaller amounts of their heavy fur.