Chris Haston/NBC; INSTAGRAM/BARASH
Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Barash couldn’t resist making Harper’s dream come true with Bowie.
Not long after welcoming a new baby, son Joaquin Lee, into their household, Brandon Barash (Stefan, DAYS) and his wife, Isabella, decided to add a puppy to the mix. “Because we’re masochists,” cracks Barash. “An infant wasn’t enough!”
Their actual motivation for the acquisition was quite sweet. Explains Barash, “I really wanted to make my 10-year-old little girl” — daughter Harper Barash, who he shares with ex-wife Kirsten Storms (Maxie, GH) — “happy, and all she wanted for her birthday was a puppy. We had two dogs, and we lost what was our first dog. It will be two years this May since he passed. We said when the time was right we’d get a second dog, so Rupert, our other dog, could have a playmate. We finally decided, ‘Why not now?’ ”
The Barash clan promptly fell in love with a three-month-old puppy, Bowie. “He’s a rescue, a purebred Border Collie,” says Barash. “He was found on the freeway entrance in Oxnard at 5:30 in the morning and brought to the animal shelter in Camarillo. We’d been searching L.A. County shelters and couldn’t find anything. We knew that if we were going to get a rescue, it had to be a puppy. I didn’t want to bring an adult dog into a house with a baby; you just don’t know how they’re going to act. So we decided to look at Ventura County animal shelters to see what they had.
“We saw Bowie, but they wouldn’t let us meet him right away,” he explained. “There’s a grace period from the time they find a dog to allow if he was somebody’s pet, the owner to come find him and claim him. We had to wait a day until he was going to be available, and then go online and fill out an application. You have to be one of the first two people to fill out an application for that particular animal. If you are, then you’re invited to come meet the dog. We lucked out. We were in first position and took him home that day.”
Bowie quickly worked his way into his new family’s hearts. “He’s just been a great dog,” raves Barash. “But he’s a Border Collie, and I guess they are notoriously hard to housebreak. So he’s been kind of a pain in the a– in that respect. But he is the sweetest, most good-natured puppy and very playful. He and Rupert are already thick as thieves. So it ended up being a good decision. But yeah, we’re nuts. We’re absolutely insane!”
