Technically, Olive's mine. Practically, she's also my sister's, and also my partner's — ask any of the three of us who actually owns her and you'll get three different, very confident answers.
When my sister and I got Olive as adults, we figured we knew what we were doing. We'd grown up with Harry, our family dog. How different could it be?
Turns out our parents were doing considerably more heavy lifting than we noticed. Being the one responsible for a dog is not the same skill as living in a house where someone else is.
Nobody warns you how much there is to know about one dog. Not the big stuff — that's a quick search. It's the specific stuff. That she won't actually settle for the night until every single person in the house has said goodnight to her — skip it, and she's up at 2am summoning you with demonic howls. That she won't eat unless you trick her into it: drop one piece, wait, drop a few more, until she remembers she's hungry and finishes the bowl. That farting anywhere near her is a personal betrayal she will not let you forget for a good ten minutes. None of that fits in a search result. It barely fits in your head at 6am when someone else has to look after her and you're trying to explain months of accumulated Olive-specific knowledge in a doorway.
So we tried writing it down. Then we tried keeping it updated. Then we gave up on both and just started texting each other instead. Constantly. From other rooms in the same house. Did you feed her? Which lead, the short one or the long one? She's doing the thing again — is that normal? Two people who lived with the same dog, running two slightly different versions of her in their heads.
If that's what happens between two people under one roof, we figured it'd be worse for anyone actually stepping in — a sitter, a friend doing us a favour, a boarding kennel meeting Olive for the first time with a five-minute handover and a dog who has opinions. All the things we'd only remember to mention the moment they became a problem.
There wasn't one place any of it lived. Not a document, not a note, nothing anyone could open and trust was still true. So we built the thing we actually needed: one link, always current, that says what we'd end up texting you anyway — before you have to ask.
Olive's quirks are still hers. Every pet has their own version — the cat who only eats if you leave the room, the dog who's fine with strangers but not strangers in hats. Quirks & All is just somewhere to put all of it down, once, properly, so the next person looking after them isn't guessing.
With love,
Olive's humans
