Operation Chocolate Milk

Hershey. Cocoa. Lindor. Rolo. Chocolates? Yes, but also the names of the various dogs Charity and her family owned in her youth.

Since meeting a breeder last year from Nova Scotia, we have been inching towards purchasing a dog for ourselves — specifically, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Earlier this year we paid a deposit against a litter for pickup in April. We began to speak in code around the children: “We need to plan our chocolate run.” “Have you heard from the chocolatier?” Our pup was born on February 28th.

Then came covid-19. And provincial border restrictions. While we had no trouble ordering everything we needed for the puppy from critterspet.com, it seemed impossible to get to the little guy. Charity and I resigned to the possibility that it may be months out, or simply never happen at all.

I had been working with the breeder through various options when I got an email on April 24th: there was a window of opportunity to deliver the pup to the Confederation Bridge! I decided to keep the news of this opportunity to myself and surprise both Charity and the children. If it fell through, it would be one fewer disappointment.

Our breeder wanted to deliver that Tuesday, April 28th — but we found ourselves in a mandatory 14-day quarantine that prohibited our leaving the property. Why?

Some months back, we made plans with close friends selling their home in another province to move this way to stay with us for a season. In light of covid-19, this was obviously not the ideal time to move: we weren’t even sure they would be allowed to enter the province. Their successful arrival at our home in mid-April was nothing but an act of God — and a great story for another time.

Unfortunately, we all had to hunker down for 14 days after their arrival, precluding us from meeting the breeder at the bridge. Fortunately, we are blessed with many incredible friends already on the island, one of whom kindly agreed to pick up the pup on our behalf and deliver him to our home.

How to explain to Charity why these friends were swinging by? As it turns out, we were running low on goats milk during our isolation, and I asked them if they would be willing to deliver that at the same time. We codenamed the plan, “Operation Chocolate Milk”.

It was a stunning success.

We’ve spent the last two weeks acclimatizing to the latest addition to our family, but everyone is in love with “Professor Friedrich Bhaer” (named after a character from Little Women). Of course, we go about calling the little guy “Bear”.

And then there were 7!