I have a license to be this cute! - by Pilgrim

I'm getting so big!  My mom took me to the doctor today and I got some shots.  That part was no fun, but I was such a good boy that I got some treats for it.  I weigh 32.6 pounds now!  My mom says I still have all of my baby teeth, whatever that means.  These are my only teeth!  I like biting stuff.  My mom says biting stuff is what little dudes do best.  But my mom also says I'm getting too big for baby teeth.  She says I should start losing my teeth soon!  Otherwise, my mom is afraid I really might grow into a giraffe, after all.  I don't want to lose my teeth, but it would be so fun to be a giraffe!  I hope she's right about that part. 

My mom says she hopes I never grow into my ears.

Now that I got more shots, my mom says we can go to the park and the beach!  She says it's because I got a license to be so cute.  I don't know what the park or the beach are, but my sister says they are really fun.  My sister is really old - she's more than one and a half - so she knows a lot about beaches and parks and stuff.  She has a license to be so cute, too.

I've been going to school for three weeks now!  I love school!  My teacher is really nice and she gives me lots of treats.  Also, I have a girlfriend!  She is a cute little blue pitt bull named Lilly.  She was really afraid of me when we first met, but then I taught her how to play like I play with my sister.  Now Lilly loves to play with me!  I hope all girls are as nice as Lilly and my sister. 

All I know is, going to school is way more fun than getting tutored.

I taught my little brother how to garden! - by Haley

Before we got my brother, I helped my mom with the gardening all the time.  My mom knew I was a smart girl when she first got me.  She had this tree in the backyard that was there when we moved in.  She built a little planter around it.  She planted some little flowers around the tree in the planter. 

Well, I got a better idea for the flowerbed.  So I dug up all of the little flowers she planted.  But then I thought it looked kind of bare...it needed something else...so I plucked some branches off the tree and planted them in the holes where the little flowers had been.  Much better!  My mom laughed to death.

Then Mom got more elaborate.  She let her mom and her husband come help.  They built some really cool planters and even installed a nice new drip system to water everything.  Oooooooooooh, my gosh!  That drip system is the funnest thing ever!  It's just like a big huge long black snake, and you have to pull and pull and pull until you can find the end.  And all of the little sprinklers at the end are like little chew toys, you just have to gnaw on them until they come off the end and then they're yours!  It's so fun.  I learned how to do this as soon as the drip system was built.  Plus, there were some brand new plants in lots of plastic pots and in the ground, and those make the funnest chew toys also.  My mom cried to death.

So she built a fence around the little garden.  It was a kind of open fence made of lattice.  Really, she should have known better.  Not only could I SEE the drip system and plants I wanted to play with, I could very easily chew through the lattice.  Duh!

So my Mom built a new fence around the garden.  This one was made of 4X4 posts set in concrete, 2X4 rails, and solid cedar panels.  It has a gate with a latch.  Mom did a great job, but she sure did cuss a lot!

Then we got my brother, and I forgot about the garden for a little while.  But guess what!  The other day, I figured out how to open the latch on the gate!  I am SOOOO smart!  So the other day I opened the gate when my mom was at work, and I taught my brother about gardening, and about plants, and about plants in pots, and about drip systems.  We gardened all day long while Mom was at work!  I figured, hey, my Mom made that gate a very, very hard trick for me to learn - but I worked so hard, I learned it!  She's going to be sooooo proud!

I was right!  Mom must have been happy when she got home and saw all the work we did, because she laughed to death again.  Then we got some treats.  Then she bought a lock for the latch on the gate.  I saw her taking pictures, but... I might have hid the evidence.  I'll never tell.

Mom's rebuttal:

Yes, it's true.  Haley has learned how to open a latched gate from the other side.  And she then taught her brother how to garden.  I tried to tell them they are the worst gardeners EVER, but I had to give them extra treats for innovation, problem solving, persistance and creative landscaping.

And here's where it gets a little spooky.  I SWEAR, I really did take some pictures of this to post on this page.  Said pictures disappeared from my camera.  Nobody has been in my house except for the dogs.  I'm starting to think maybe I should stay home and garden, and let Haley go to my job and work on cancer.  She will singlehandedly find the cure before the lot of us.

I'm getting big and going to school! - by Pilgrim

I went to the doctor and she says I'm officially NO LONGER a coughy-head!  That means I'm clear to go to school!  My mom signed me up for puppy class.  We start tomorrow.

My mom says the trainer is a Sea World animal trainer who does these puppy classes just one night per week.  So I hope she is good.  I hate trying to train people who just aren't catching on.  I totally have my mommy trained to do everything I want.  I'm pretty sure it's because I'm so cute.

My doctor says I weight 27.2 pounds now!  A month ago I only weighed 14!  So I have now outgrown my little crate and my mom let me move into a bigger crate.  It's like a palace!  My mom calls it my King Size Executive Suite.

My mom says I still have all my baby teeth.  I don't know what that means.  They're the only teeth I have!  But I really like to bite stuff.  In fact, I think biting stuff is my favorite thing ever, except for playing with my sister.  The ultimate fun, though, is biting my sister.  I like to latch onto one ear and let her pull me around that way.  My mom says I look like a water skiier. 

Enough with the rain, already! - by Mom

My poor kids!

After nearly a month in quarantine for kennel cough, they're now dying to get outside - but not in this weather!!  Haley pooped in the sun room for the first time EVER this week.  She took one look at the incessant torrential downpour, and said, "Mom...I give up.  I'm NOT going out in that.  And I can't hold it anymore.  Sorry."

On the few occasions when I have physically forced her out into the yard, she picks a high spot, like a little pitcher's mound, and stands with all four feet practically touching each other while the waters of life swirl around her.  Doesn't like to get her feet wet.  It's pathetic.  But cute.  She's such a girl. 

Pilgrim is actually braver than his sister when it comes to the rain.  But... I'm not.  So housebreaking is tough.  I guess I'm a girl too.

I guess I'm lucky to have a dog-friendly sun room, which is more of a "mud room" at this time of year.  They have this funny habit of running from one door to the other.  I think they're hoping that maybe even though it's raining out one door, it will still be sunny out the other one.  But in the end, when they have energy to spare, they have no problem just chasing each other in circles in Mom's living room.  I try to avoid that.

Two dog jog! - By Haley

I taught my little brother how to go jogging!  He's pretty good at it, but he is too slow.  I wanted to run but I had to wait for my brother.  BORING!

My mom says, "don't worry Haley, we will still go by ourselves until he gets bigger."

I have a sneaking suspicion that my mom might be the crazy lady on the block.  People always look at us when I take my mom jogging while she rides her bike.  When we had my brother too, people were looking even more!  I have to admit, Mom does look a little funny riding along with the handlebars in one hand and two dogs in the other. 

I told everyone, "don't worry - I've got it all under control".  It's a lot of responsibility being the alpha female.

Kennel cough stinks! - by Pilgrim

My mom has been calling me a coughy-head.  Or sometimes a coughy-coughy-head.  I admit, I have been coughing a lot.  I don't know why, because I feel fine.  But my mom keeps putting me in jail!  Every time I cough - jail!  Every time I want to play with my sister - jail!  Every time I see a new toy I want to play with - especially if I want to run around the house with it - jail!  No fair!  My sister never has to go to jail!

There are a lot of fun toys around the house, too!  I love reading my mom's books.  And I really love stealing the remote control to watch TV.  But... my all time favorite toy: the dish towels.  My mom leaves them hanging off the stove and I'm sure they are there just because they're so fun to take!  It's like having my own personal toy rack and I get to choose which one I'm in the mood to play with!

And my mom totally can't catch me.  I just do figure eights around the kitchen table, then the coffee table, kitchen table, coffee table.  It's hilarious watching my mom try to catch up.  The only way she ever catches me is when she gets my sister to cut me off.  Together they can corner me.  But I still fit under the couch, so I can usually get around that move too!  Woohoo!

My mom is home schooling me since I am a coughy-head and I can't go to puppy class yet.  So far I'm getting really good at "look", "sit", "stay", "heel" and "down".  I'm really smart!  I'll totally do tricks for my mom as long as she keeps the treats coming.  And I just pretend I don't understand "no", so that part is covered.  I'm so much smarter than Mom!

The good news is, I haven't coughed for a couple of days, so now mom lets me out of jail a lot more.  My sister and I wrestle and wrestle until we are both covered in slobber.  Good times, good times!

Pilgrim has kennel cough and "down syndrome" - By Mom

About a week after Pilgrim came home, he started coughing.  We're talking the hacking kind of cough that results in gagging.  Poor kid!  So I took him to the vet and she said, "yep, that's kennel cough."  It's usually nothing - just like a cold.  But in a young pup who hasn't had all his vaccinations, it can turn into pnemonia, which is very serious.

So he's on antibiotics and cough suppressant and I'm supposed to keep him quiet.  The first two parts are no problem.  The third...

Trouble with kennel cough is, the dog feels fine.  Try keeping an 8 week old puppy who feels fine, quiet.  The only option is to confine the little dude.  This works to calm him down, but it's a lot like shaking up a can of Coke.  Or pulling the pin on a grenade.  You better hope you don't take the next step.  But...a pup can't stay in a crate forever.  So when you finally open the gate...look out!

Haley is as big of a problem.  I'm also supposed to keep the two of them separated, as it's highly, highly contagious (hence, the name).  But it took me about 0.002 days to determine that 1) she's already been exposed to it for a week, and 2) it's not worth it.  She is an adult dog who has had all her shots, so...they are in fact allowed together.

Except that the worst possible way to calm down a puppy is to turn him loose with another puppy.  So I have been trying to at least shape the insanity into something productive.  Training.

Because we're now all quarantined, Pilgrim can't attend puppy class until he fully recovers.  So I'm dusting off my Petco lessons from when Haley was younger and home-schooling.  Pilgrim is doing very well, except for "down".  He just didn't get it using the Petco approach.  I remember another puppy in Haley's class having the same problem.  That puppy ended up dropping out of the class.

So I took a different approach, which entails getting him to sit, and then simultanously saying, "down", holding a treat on the ground with my right hand, and sweeping his front paws out from under him with my left.  It took some coordination on my part, but it seems to be working!  He's now "down"ing on his own.  Good boy!

I'm also working with Haley again, something I haven't done for a while.  But now that training is in the daily routine, it's there for both of them.  This week Haley has learned, "go to your place."  This will come in major handy.  Such a smart girl!  Next week, tax returns.  I need to call the Lissners.