When our daughter was in first grade, my husband and I made a classic parenting mistake. With children aged 7 and 4, we decided that our kids were at the right stage in their young lives to get a dog.

They had been begging for a dog, praying for a dog, dressing up as dogs and talking about dogs nonstop. My husband grew up with dogs and cats in his house, so he knew what it was all about. I grew up with neither, but since we married we always had cats, so I figured a dog couldn't be that much more work, right? 

So the woman who compared six stroller brands for three months before choosing one and who spent hours on the Internet and paging through Consumer Reports before buying a car decided in all of about five minutes that a dog was a good idea.

No, not just a good idea. Necessary to the proper development of my children.  

In hindsight, I should have realized I'd only use the stroller for a few years and that the car might end up being replaced. The dog -- the good idea, necessary dog -- has a slightly longer lifespan. Yeah, that's one decision that could have used a little more thought.

Now before you go and think I'm a dog-hater, I'm not. But something quickly became clear to me that no one told me before we had a dog: Many dogs prefer adults, and even if you get a family-friendly breed or an amiable mutt, dogs don't always gravitate toward the kids.

So before I knew it, I was the proud owner of one used dog between the ages of 2 and 4. With no identifying information, the shelter didn't know his true age. The name he came with, and the name our kids wanted to keep, was Patch, although he has no patches. He was a slightly overweight pup that resembled a giant Chihuahua. 

A giant Chihuahua that from day one only had eyes for me.

We had made solid plans to get a dog that would enhance the children's lives. Patch wasn't having it. He was going to enhance my life, and that was about it.

The bad news for him is that I didn't need my life enhanced. I had just gotten to the point where my children no longer followed me around anymore, and now I was the proud owner of a dog who did just that. Every time I turned around, Patch was right there. Sit down? He's up on my lap. Folding laundry? He's staring at me, adoringly, from the other side of the ironing board.

I am apparently pretty darn fascinating. You don't know that about me, but Patch does. If I'm awake, he's right there with those big, bug-eyed baby browns intently focused on my next move.

As for the kids, they still love him all these years later, even if he mostly uses them as something to step on to get to me on the couch. My husband doesn't do much besides occasionally feed him because he's "mom's dog." And I've become used to having a shadow, even though I never, ever saw that coming.

So the secret that no one ever told me was that, in the end, the dog often really only likes mom.

And the secret I don't tell?

I didn't need a dog, but sometimes it's kind of nice to have something that thinks the sun rises when you get up and goes down when you go to sleep. As we count down the weeks until my oldest is officially a teenager, maybe having my No. 1 fan always by my side will turn out to be just what I needed -- even if I didn't know it.