Meet the Puppy Who's Healing Our Broken Hearts

What's inside this post: Hide

A couple of months ago I shared our story about losing Luna to cancer this year, which is the main reason I've been so 'quiet' for most of 2026. This is the happy update which follows the sad story that came before it.

Meet Rowan!

If you haven't watched the previous video about Luna's story yet, the short version is: we lost our dog Luna to lymphoma earlier this summer, and we've spent the past couple of months grieving our unexpected loss and trying to navigate our next steps when we were ready to adopt another dog-hter.

My husband and I have been married for just shy of 20 years now, and we've known each other for almost 25 years. For most of that time, we've only been without a dog for about 1-2 weeks. Having a dog is part of our lives, and that's the way we've always wanted it. No children, pets only.

So after Luna passed, our house was just WAY too quiet. The sound of her nails clacking on the hard floors, her comfortable sighs while sleeping on her bed behind my desk, no more ridiculous hound whines (she was a drama queen!), and no more barking at the mail truck like our mailman had personally wronged her. Just... too quiet.

Of course we have Willow too, our nutty orange tabby cat, but she's very independent, and not a cuddle bug, so it wasn't the comfort we needed during our grief.

Anyway, this isn't a business post, so I'm not tying it back to something I learned that is applicable to our business life. 😂 There are no client systems or Squarespace tips in this post.

But if you've been following LTDT, especially those of you who have subscribed to my YouTube channel, you've probably seen Luna in my videos before and you may have seen the update video that shared Luna's story (including super cute videos & photos of her puppy-ness).

So, for you, here's the story of how Rowan found us, and what her first couple weeks have looked like so far, and even how you can adopt a rescue of your own if you're looking for your next doggy buddy too.

Meet Rowan: Our Rescued Hound Puppy

Rowan

Rowan is 4.5 months old, and she is an unknown "hound mix"; we genuinely don't know what she is yet. We plan to do a DNA test to find out what her makeup is out of curiosity! Our best guess right now is some hound, maybe a little Weimaraner, but honestly your guess is as good as mine at this point. Leave a comment on this post if you have any breed-specific guesses! 😃

Naming our pets is always a hard process. We like 1-2 syllable names, and it turns out we've accidentally built a plant-based naming tradition for our pets without ever deciding to. We had Lilly (Lily), then Luna (another white flower, in case you didn't catch that one), and Willow, our cat. We landed on Rowan, because we have a pretty rowan tree in our backyard that the hummingbirds love. (It also happens to be the name of a cool character in one of my favorite YA fiction series by Sarah J. Maas—TOG—, even if that character is male.)

She's sooo sweet, incredibly gentle, quiet (for the most part), with a healthy side of anxiety that makes complete sense once you know what she's been through in the last half of her life so far.

Rowan's Backstory (What Happened Before We Met Her)

Rowan was surrendered by someone in the southeast US who couldn't fix her broken leg after she'd gotten hit by a car. Her previous owner admitted he just wasn't watching her when she was hit. I don't know all the details of what happened after that, whether there wasn't a fenced yard or he couldn't or wouldn't cover the vet bill.

Anyway, you can actually feel where the bone healed if you run your hand along the inside of her leg. The first vet quoted $1,500 to amputate her entire leg! Or $3,000 to heal it. 😳 Luckily her foster Mom got a second opinion, and the next vet said puppies heal fast, and they decided to splint it instead. She got a new splint every week for six weeks and it healed just fine.

That's why she was older than most of the other puppies in her rescued batch brought up to New England from the southeast. Her leg needed to heal first before she'd be ready for adoption.

We put a hold on her the moment we saw her listing on AdoptAPet. Part of what drew us to her was obviously how adorable she looked (I mean—just look at her!—those sad hound eyes are gorgeous). Beyond that, what really drew me to her was that her rescue described her as gentle and shy. We have a cat, Willow, and a dog who'd bulldoze our cat wasn't going to work for our house, plus we've had a shy & gentle dog in the past that was our first dog as a couple. So, gentle and shy sounded like exactly what we needed during our grief.

We drove down to Connecticut to meet her and see if she was a good fit. We walked into the room where she cowered in a corner, and with us being quiet, slow, and comforting, she promptly curled up in the corner of the room to get some sleep. We supposed she finally felt safe enough with us to fall asleep—which, fair. She'd been transported hundreds of miles right before, and finally arrived the same morning we met her for the first time. That'd be a lot for anyone, let alone a four-month-old puppy who's already had a rough start at life.

We both knew immediately we wanted to protect her, and that she needed parents who could be patient while she figured out that she was safe now and develop some confidence.

How We Actually Found Her

Before we met Rowan, we'd researched about 30 different dogs within a four or five hour radius of us, willing to travel for the right potential fit. As nerds (like myself) do, I set up a Notion database with links to every dog we were interested in, plus photos and basic stats for each: breed mix, approximate location, whatever info the listing gave us that mattered most to us for each dog.

If you're interested in adopting a new pet, Adopt a Pet does a good job of aggregating listings from humane societies, rescues, and shelters nationwide, so you don't have to manually check 50 different organization websites one at a time. Petfinder is a good option too, though it's owned by Purina and I didn't like the way it listed locations for where the pets were because it made it hard to know if they had already been transported to the city they were listed in, or not (ie: hard to know if they were nearby yet, or not, so you can go meet them in person). I'd also suggest not creating an account with a Google sign in, as we kept getting kicked out & had to sign back in very frequently while using their website which was really annoying.

Rowan happened to be the first dog we decided to meet in person, out of all 30-ish we'd been researching. Double vet bills aside, I honestly would have wanted to adopt two or three more of the dogs from our wishlists; they are all so precious! We've always been a single-dog household though, so Rowan won. ☺️

Settling Into Home

Rowan

We brought Rowan home in late August. As I'm writing this, it's barely been two weeks, and she's already doing so much better than the first day we met her!

She's handled meeting Willow well (Willow, for her part, just tolerates her, which is expected behavior and about as warm a welcome as any adult cat gives a puppy, imagine). Rowan has also met a couple of the neighbor's kittens without incident (a very supervised meeting). She's already started barking at strangers and protecting her backyard space, which we're taking as a good sign that she's starting to feel like this is her territory, her home, and her people worth protecting.

She hasn't had any potty accidents which is mind-blowing. When we first brought her home, we were physically carrying her in and out of the backyard because she was too scared to cross the threshold of the door on her own. Within a few days, she was walking herself out into the backyard with us! She's about 30 pounds, so we're genuinely relieved we didn't have to keep picking her up and carrying her around like a very anxious small child.

She's bonded really well with me already, and now she's bonding with my husband too. She's practically been attached to my hip since we got home with her.

We waited to adopt again until we knew we could actually be more emotionally ready to parent a puppy. We also expanded the fenced area of our large backyard a little and replaced some of the fencing that needed it. To get ready for possibly bringing Rowan home, we found our old puppy-sized collars, harnesses, puppy-worthy dog toys out of storage from our previous dogs (turns out we have a PetsMart isle worth of dog toys in storage 😂), got some puppy pads, and puppy food.

I've done fuck-all for the past couple weeks, work-wise, so I could help my husband with Rowan and both get her comfortable and build some confidence with us. Running a business you built yourself is supposed to come with the flexibility to prioritize what matters when it matters, and if I couldn't take some time off to help a scared rescue puppy settle into her new life, then what's the point of building something that's supposed to fit around your life?

I finally understand what my Mom goes through with her 3 girls, calling us the wrong name sometimes, as I've accidentally called Rowan, Willow, Lilly, or Luna out of habit. At this point the only names left in the rotation are mine and my husband's, so I assume that's coming eventually too. 😂 Hey—my brain is doing its best! 🤭

Rowan likes to sleep on her dog bed next to my desk while I work, currently positioned where I can see her, and eventually she'll move to the spot behind me where Luna used to hang out, so hopefully she'll be in some future video content as Luna used to be. 💛

That's it for now!

No business tips or tutorials today! Just a personal life update that I figured I'd share, because I shared Luna's story too, so this is the happy follow-up.

If you want more puppy content in the meantime, I sometimes post pics/updates for members inside the Club. And if you've got a rescue pet story of your own, drop it in the comments! 😊

I used Tella to record & edit this post’s video in no-time flat; try it out for yourself!