We registered Holly with the American Kennel Club.  When you register a dog with the AKC, you can’t just register her as Holly, or even Holly Fox, or Holly Robertson.  We learned this a long time ago, when we decided to register our childhood dogs.  When we attempted to register Jenny

the AKC would not accept “Jenny” as a name.  So Jenny became “Jennifer of Little Falls.”  (We lived on Little Falls Road.)  When our next dog came along, Tasha*

became “Lady’s Natasha Samsonova.”  (Her mother was Lady, her father was Sam, and Mom had a master’s in Russian lit.)

When we got Chinook and Saguaro, we got all the papers to register them, but never got around to it, so they were just plain old Chinook and Saguaro.

We got Holly from the same wonderful breeder, Linda Francis, who asked us this time to please register Holly for reasons related to the fact that Linda is now a Breeder of Merit with the AKC.  And since Linda has brought such immeasurable joy into our lives, we would do almost anything for her.  She also suggested that since Holly was one of a litter of 10 girl puppies, the litter theme was “girls.”  “Holly” will be her “call name,” but she’d need a registered name that includes the word “girl;” it would go with the name of Linda’s kennel, Fly’n Hi.  We thought of and rejected a couple. Riot Grrls seemed appropriately transgressive, but turned out (upon Googling) to be sort of dark.  We had settled on Mighty Girl, which seemed cool but sort of obscure, when I realized that I was spontaneously calling her by what would become her AKC name:

So, everybody, meet  Fly’n Hi Funny Girl, a/k/a Holly:

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* Yes, I have better photos of Tasha, but I thought the Impeach Nixon hat was a classic!