Dogs

We have six dogs that hang around our place.  Fortunately all of them are not ours.  Emily belongs to Lois, Mike's mom.  Finn belongs to Suzanne and Heath and Mike and I share ownership of Blackie with Laura.  Nevertheless that is a lot of dogs.

Mike does the primary dog care work.  I oversee but only as it comes to Lilly's care.  I feed her myself as I do not want her to get over weight and have back problems like some of our dashchunds have had in the past.  I also have her crate trained which is not something Mike does with any of the other dogs.

I am very grateful that Mike takes the dogs on daily walks.  Even though they have a large area to roam near our house, they prefer that Mike comes with them through the timber.  Even the smallest dogs join Mike.  This makes the walk a bit stressful for Mike as we are afraid if they wonder away from him they might become dinner for a coyote.  So far that has not happened for which I am very grateful.  However, the best part of this daily walk is when they come home.  Every dog (including the puppy Lilly) proceed to take a nap.

Lilly taking a nap is very important to my peaceful state of mind.  If she is awake I must keep an eye on her.  I obviously have not been doing a great job of this in the last week.  She chewed up an extension cord that was under the couch, a valentine ornament she took off my valentine tree, some rubber stamps out of my sewing room supplies and my shoes are mysteriously moving around the house.  So to solve this problem I went shopping and bought six new dog toys.  The best one is the red Kong chew toy.  Per instructions I filled it with peanut butter and small liver treats.  She loved it.  She stuck with it until it was licked clean.  However, the negative was that she did not eat any of her dog food the rest of the day.  Too full.  So I had to put that toy away.  Now I have gone back to watching her closely and have unplugged all floor lamps in the living room.  

Finn has settled in well at the pond.  He continues to leap over the back yard fence but as he only goes to the front door that is not a problem.  He does not use the doggy door which maybe why he leaves the yard by going over the fence.  He loves being outside.  He has taken it upon himself to guard us from the visiting geese but as they show no fear he soon loses interest announcing their presence.  I tried to capture all this in a picture but he chose that moment to abandon his guard duty.  

Suzanne and Laura think Frankie is so adorable that they took pictures of him the other day playing with a stick.  I condensed their twenty slides down to three so you could judge for yourself.  

Even though having all of these dogs is a lot of responsibility, Mike and I think they are worth having around.  We are convinced that our children would not come to visit us nearly as often if it were not for the draw of the dogs.