Working on the husband

About 2 years ago, I found out there was such a thing as an autism service dog. The benefits of these dogs are numerous...besides being the child's best friend (and often only friend)...the dogs help with socialization's, giving the child something they can talk about with other people...when otherwise they have no idea how to go about having conversations with people. The dogs can be trained to keep the child from running off, alert the parents if the child wakes up in the middle of the night, console a child during a melt down, and interrupt self injurious behavior. The drawbacks are these dogs are SOOOO expensive. The cheapest being around $5000 up to around $20,000...and these are all not for profit companies we're talking about. They say you need to "fund raise" the money...I'm sorry but how the heck do you fund raise that kind of $$$??? I mean seriously, we just did a walk-a-thon and I was psyched to get $500! So the thought of a service dog for Isaiah was put on the back burner...it'd be nice but not for the price of a car!

Then came the school year from hell, and the evil neighbors and I began wanting a watch dog...I may not be able to afford a awesome service dog, but if I could at LEAST have a big scary looking dog that would bark at evil children, I'd feel a little better! I almost had the beautiful Husky Skye, although very friendly and docile, her big wolf like features might deter some bullies away from her!But as you know the husband backed out on that one.

The other night I stayed over at work to sit w/ a suicide patient (which means they pay me to play on the computer LOVE IT!)...after checking my emails, I got bored and started looking up service dogs again for the heck of it, who knows maybe I missed a site before, maybe there were new agencies...if nothing else it gave me something to do. Well, I came across a woman, who trains service dogs for profit, and get this charges $2000...WTF FOR PROFIT??? REALLY??? THAT CHEAP??? $2000 is a much more reasonable amount to fund raise! She wasn't in my area, Colorado I think...but that got me thinking...maybe I could find a private trainer! Well I found over 100 in my area most were just obedience training, but about 40 of them were licenced to train service dogs. I emailed every one of them. One in particular was extremely helpful, and we've emailed back in forth in great length. She is very experienced and is definitely training for the love of it!

Now the next challenge, getting the husband on board! He has moved past the NO phase on to the, I'll consider it stage, so we've made progress lol. I've found numerous links for him to read...I think the biggest problem is, he doesn't understand that this isn't just another pet, this is an actual working dog that could make our lives 100 times better...I mean seriously, going to a store w/ out him darting off in a 1000 different directions all the time, that alone is worth it if the dog does nothing else!!! So we shall see what becomes of this...he did say we'd have to find the kittens homes first before he would consider it...so that's first, I said ok one kitten for one dog lol. Keep your fingers crossed for me! I feel in my heart he is going to come around once he understands that this is something that will have great benefits for Isaiah.