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Enter, on oversize paws, Scout.

Stupefying sleep deprivation, baffling health concerns, alarming new expenditures, overweening pride. Even the most sophisticated couples are shredded and then reconstituted by the challenges and changes of new parenthood. Bottomless fascination with our objects of love, and the many choices through which we express it, fuel conversations all over city parks and Internet forums. Perhaps recognizing this appetite for baby talk, canine as well as human, Abramson began a blog about Scout on the Times Web site when the puppy was just 9 weeks old. Born to a litter of British standard retrievers, Scout (named for the plucky narrator of “To Kill a Mockingbird”) began life as the runt with an “attitude,” as the breeder put it, both qualities that would suit her eventual life in the big city. Henry had chosen the type, falling for the unusual snow-white variation of the golden retriever after getting to know a neighbor’s dog near the couple’s country home in Connecticut. At the time, Abramson took some heat from readers for not adopting from a shelter, and in “The Puppy Diaries” she admits to having felt guilty over the decision. But after giving the good cause of shelter adoption its due, she doesn’t dwell. Hers is the vantage point of satisfied hindsight. Every chair-chewing, face-licking, field-romping day in Scout’s first year strengthens the human-animal bond. Indeed, on the besotted shores of dogmania, there can be no other dog than the one there beside you.

Scout’s first months with Abramson and her husband unfold over a summer in Connecticut. The timing, like most of the couple’s dog decisions, has been carefully calculated to take advantage of good weather and vacation time. But even after their years with Buddy, the learning curve for the family is steep. Retrievers, unlike compact Westies, are big, ravenous, exercise fanatics. The friendly, avid disposition that makes them fine service animals, search and rescue dogs, and ideal pets for families with small children still must be honed. (A naughty and untutored golden will eventually mow you and everything in your house down with its general joie de vivre.) So Scout’s human parents, with the full force of education and disposable income, get to work. They pore over the Monks of New Skete and the works of Temple Grandin (whom Abramson also interviewed). They probe the aisles of Petco. They read dog food labels, set up taste tests, put in calls to the nutrition expert Marion Nestle. Ultimately, though, the three absorb their best life lessons at a daily “Breakfast Club” get-together on a nearby farm. It’s here that Scout learns to interpret social cues from older dogs and Abramson and Henry pick up practical advice from the other dogs’ owners.

Like most puppies, Scout is a chewer. And she needs to learn to walk on a leash. So the pack troops off to Puppy Kindergarten. Putting Scout and herself through the paces, Abramson is “hellbent” on helping the dog acquire her American Kennel Club basic puppy manners certificate. “As part of a generation obsessed with getting our kids into the right schools,” she writes with typically unadorned candor, “I recognized I was taking these puppy classes a little too seriously.” Still she’s thrilled when Scout masters “Down,” “Leave it,” “Off” and earns her coveted diploma. Autumn approaches, and Abramson confidently prepares to introduce her rapidly growing young friend to life in the big city.

“Concentrate on what we want,” the puppy teacher Diane Abbott counsels Abramson. “Don’t give attention to what we don’t like.” The advisory could serve as a cornerstone of the “positive training” method endorsed by so many dog professionals. But when what we don’t want is the dog relieving herself in the middle of the Duxiana mattress, trying to swipe a chicken from an outdoor table at Locanda Verde or eating your husband’s prescription glasses, it can be difficult not to give her some attention. Scout’s adolescence — yes, dogs are jerks when they’re teenagers too — coincides with her transition to New York, upending Abramson’s house and equilibrium. By late fall, the dog is more than 60 pounds of obstreperous energy. When Scout barrels into the path of oncoming traffic with Abramson at the other end of the leash, it’s time to consider some other, less sunny, educational approaches. Abramson gets a referral for a dog-training officer called “CujoCop,” who sounds much scarier than he is. Eventually, the galloping, galumphing animal is brought to heel. As a family friend says to Scout, relegating her naughty impulses to the back bench of a puppy’s imperative, “You are trying really hard to be good, baby.”

Sentimental notions and flights of extreme anthropomorphism abound in “The Puppy Diaries.” But Abramson seems confident of her congenial audience. And the true happiness she expresses at making, midlife and post-crisis, a tender new bond with another dog plants a solid bridge over the more gooey footing underneath. At last the question hangs: Can one ever love a second dog as much as the first? The answer is of course the one we knew all along. When Scout is a little more than a year old, Abramson has another accident, taking a bad fall while hiking at Yellowstone National Park. She is again hospitalized and, returning home, is fearful of being knocked about by her canine pal. As the best dogs do, Scout intuits a problem. “I was the patient on pain medication,” Abramson writes, “but Scout behaved as if she were on Valium.” The young dog takes up a vigil at Abramson’s bedside and, in doing so, makes a place all her own.
[8] Ten Common Mistakes Everyone Makes In Corgi Puppies For Sale At Amsterdam Corgi Puppies For Sale At Amsterdam | corgi puppies for sale at amsterdam