Molly joins the Baumanns

I ordered and named Molly before she was conceived. Both of my kids, Jeff and Chelsea, were grown and gone. Empty nest feelings were setting in. I needed a Golden retriever, I insisted. I promised to train it. It would be the perfect dog, I promised. I would call her Molly.

Jim, my husband, couldn't believe I actually wanted a dog. There had been a time when with two small children I had banished our two previous mutts with their fleas and dirt to the back yard. I rarely interacted with them. They ran with the kids as they grew. They grew old and died, outside yard dogs.

We had had the freedom of being dogless for a decade. Wasn't it time to travel and enjoy life as a couple?" my husband asked. I was quite convincing about how committed I was to getting a dog and training it as a true, well-mannered companion.

A friend who worked with my sister had a Golden retriever that she intended to breed. I ordered a female and told her the dog would be named Molly. Out of the womb, Molly was called by her name, treated as special, played with the most, and scandalously pampered. She was the ONLY female born in a litter of 10 pups. She was the runt of the litter and the lightest in color. She was going to be my perfect dog.

A couple of weeks after Molly was born, a bachelor friend Mark Putnam and I took the two-hour drive in rain to view the pups. Molly fit in my hand, limp with eyes barely opened. Mark fell in love and reserved the second lightest and largest pup in the litter. He named Molly's brother, Max.

At eight weeks, Molly came home to our brand new house. I had picked out the carpet not to show Golden retriever hair. The dog pen had cement footings, so she couldn't dig out. We were ready to love our new perfect pet.

As promised, I enrolled Molly in puppy school. She barked and peed the floor in each and every puppy classes, paying no attention at all to any of the commands that we were supposedly teaching. Just before our third class, new neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves to me and invite us to the first annual Fourth of July block party. I took them out to our back yard to see our new landscaping shaping up. I introduced them to my new puppy.

Molly was jumping, wiggling, and running. All at once, we all gasped as we saw the hurt baby bird fluttering helplessly. It was almost as big as Molly's head. Three women ran toward the poor thing to save it from harm, but Molly was much faster than we were. She grabbed it in her mouth and ran round and round. We chased and screamed, but in one gulp, Molly swallowed it whole. My new neighbors and I were horrified. We were all fighting back the retching.

I quietly led the new neighbors back out to the front door. After a pregnant pause, we tried valiantly to refocus on the upcoming party. Finally, I said how nice it was to meet them. "If you ever want to experience another 'Wild Kingdom' moment, just stop by," I lamely joked, as I closed the door.

Of course, the question for the puppy class instructor that evening was, "Can swallowing a bird whole hurt this puppy? Will it block something? Will she need an operation?"

The instructor said, "Watch the poop. Hopefully it will just pass through."

I couldn't bear to do it, but my husband Jim took on poop patrol duty. He reported a couple of days later that a bird skull had shown up. Guess Molly wasn't going to die from eating a bird. Jim and I decided to skip the Fourth of July party. We became known in the neighborhood as the people whose mean puppy ate the poor, helpless, baby bird. As the story was passed from neighbor to neighbor, it became more and more embellished. We decided it was best to lie low.

And this is how Molly, "my perfect dog," began her life in our family. The time it would take to help Molly become my "perfect dog" ideal had started to set in. We had a long way to go.