We loaded up the entire family in the car to meet @AddicusLegacy in a Wal Mart parking lot to help them save dogs they had saved from the worst of fates in Mexico.

Safe in Austin was just a baby non profit then.

There hadn’t been any huge media stories.

No Netflix shows.

We didn’t know where the funds or the space would come from.

The truth is, we didn’t even know how many puppies they were going to come home with.

We brought home 14. Which brought our puppy count at the time to 19.

They came to us carrying worms, parasites, kennel cough and… unfortunately distemper. They came from drug houses, shelters were they were pulled just hours before they would have been euthanized and three lab looking mixes from a dumpster.

The entire rescue cost us upwards of $25,000. Countless weeks of no sleep.

Heartbreak.

Our rescue family showed up.

We raised the funds.

We built the shelters.

We found forever homes and offered second chances.

I didn’t know why.

But I knew those puppies needed us.

As it always works, it turns out, we really needed those puppies too.

One of the lab puppies found at a dumpster behind a dog shelter in Mexico, that we picked up in the middle of the night four years ago, is our very own, Geneva Grace.

It’s crazy to think we could have passed her up that night.

How easily I could have taken a different group of puppies. How simple it would have been. How I never would have looked back.

Lyssa came to the rescue the first time just days later. Met the blonde baby on that very first visit. None of us knew they were both already home.

Three weeks later, I loaded Geneva up in the car with her new Mama, certain that together they would change the world, just not sure how. It was a beginning of a journey that brought Lyssa and Geneva back to us to stay.

That sweet little puppy was abandoned by a dumpster in Mexico, survived distemper, alerts to all sorts of medical conditions for her mama, is pretty much perfect when it comes to public access and is the first to welcome anyone who comes to the rescue with her giant Geneva Grace smile.