Top 5 Ways To Convince Your Hubbie You Need to Foster a Dog

5.  Start casually mentioning all of the cute puppies you are seeing on various rescue sites.  Show him pictures.  Utterly convince him that you want to adopt a new dog without ever saying those words.

 OK.  This may have backfired.  I just perused the Oregon Humane Society website for an appropriately adorable picture.  They have mini-Aussies - which are extremely rare to find in a shelter (3 of them in fact!).  Pictured above is Lulu (#98820).  You get the intelligence and agility of an Australian shepherd in the most adorable miniature form.  Can someone please take this sweetie home before I do??? 

4.  Mention that dogs replace any urge for babies for you.  Locate fun facts like the hormone manufactured by nursing mothers (oxytocin) is also produced by people when they pet their dogs.  Get him starting to think that no new puppy = maybe Sarah starting to think about having kids.  Put the fear of babies in him!

3.  Discuss with him how you would love your current fur-babies to be able to go to work with you every day in your new store but that their behavior issues make them unlikely candidates for managing to be well-behaved in a public retail setting.  Lament that you really wish you had a "shop dog".

2.  When the above 3 have worked like a charm and he graciously tells you that you can get a new dog when your store is up and running, reveal to him that you really feel the need to begin rescuing.  Offer up your new adorable puppy to the Gods of Altruism and request to foster dogs in need instead.

1.  Write a blog post describing said nefarious methods of gentling easing the hubbie into the idea of fostering, point out that it makes zero sense to wait to foster until you are so busy with the new store that you don't have the time, and that fostering now would mean that you take on the brunt of the training and care a foster dog would need.  Cross your fingers, tell your hubbie how much you love him and wait with bated breath...

Shit!  I'm still thinking about that mini-Aussie.