Another mouth to feed . . .

. . .although I think she needs a little help with portion control! On Saturday, we added a very spunky and chunky pooch to the Huffman Crew. She's part pug and part beagle, creatively called a "puggle." She came with the name "Jade", but we are going to be renaming or somehow modifying her name to avoid this scenario, which happened 20 times yesterday: I call for her "Jade, come here" and Dave, who is in some other part of the house or yard hears "Dave, come here." He says "Just a minute", to which I respond "huh?" because I don't know what I'm waiting a minute for, seeing how I didn't call him to "come here." Jade and Dave just sound too similar for him to be able to discriminate. Ironically, the dad of the family where we got her was named Dave as well, but it apparently didn't bother him. Naming has been a difficult task. Keller has primary responsibility for her (as much responsibility as can be expected of a 6 1/2 year old wild child), so we're kind of giving him veto powers on names, which he has exercised freely.

Here are a few pictures. . .if you think of a good name, add a comment to the blog!



A little back story, for those of you who may be wondering why we felt compelled to add another small dependent being to our family just six months after bringing Marley home. . .Keller has inherited my love for all things living. He has been begging for a dog for a long time. Layla and Wilson were great dogs, but they were already 6-7 years old when Keller came along, so they were never really 'his' dogs. He wanted a dog who would sleep in his room, play fetch with him, and so on. We talked about it off and on, and then Keller kicked it into high gear. Right around the day last week that I found our unnamed pooch on craigslist, Keller watched one of the Beethoven movies (again). Here is what he did after the movie was over:

*Sign that says "FOD" (food) taped to the driveway, with an arrow pointing to a trail of pretzel sticks leading into the house


*Sign that says "MOR FOD" sitting next to two bags of pretzel sticks in the garage


*Binoculars and chair, where he then sat and watched for stray dogs to show up for the pretzels


After all of that, he went inside and brought out his allowance. He said he needed help making a sign to let people know that if they were cruel to their dogs, they could give them to him and he'd give them $1 or $5 from his allowance.

So, on Wednesday night, Dave & I went on a top secret mission to meet the dog and see if we thought she'd fit into our family well. She looks so much like Layla, it was instantly endearing. When we told the kids the news on Thursday night after dinner, Keller broke down into tears of joy, which I have never seen from him before. It was so sweet, raw, and sincere--Dave and I both got a little misty, too! She did, indeed, sleep in his room last night, and she has come pretty close to fetching the ball, although she seems to have the spirit of Layla and Wilson guiding her to run up to the ball, then get distracted and move on to something more interesting rather than bringing the ball back.


In other news. . .

*The boys and I took a picnic and went fishing at the pond near us. We didn't catch anything, but the fresh air was great and it was a nice alternative to hanging out at the pool.




*Marley wore her first ponytail this week. I had no idea of her physical strength until I tried to hold her still to put this sucker in her hair. She didn't like it one bit, and was really quite angry with me for awhile afterward, but then she forgot about it. She looked so cute, but I don't know how soon I'll be ready to attempt that again. I may have to start working out a little harder, and maybe take a Clif Shot or Gu before launching my attack next time.



*We spent a morning at Clemyjontri park, which is an awesome playground that is fully wheelchair accessible. I saw something from a different perspective while we were there. I've always thought of it as a great place for kids in wheelchairs, with walkers, crutches, etc. but this time, I saw a wheelchair-bound grandma rolling all over the playground and park to watch her grandkids play. I loved seeing that side of things.










*We did a little bit of geocaching with our GPS and found a few caches in the park.







*The damn deer has been coming around to the front of the house and having a munch on the landscaping that I busted my butt to put in last year. We saw him in the backyard, trying to eat out of the (empty--haha) bird feeder the other night. He just hopped right over the fence when he was ready to leave. I bought some deer-off spray and covered my flowers with it a few nights ago. I contemplated staying up late and watching out the window through night-vision goggles to witness the look on his face when he got a whiff of that stuff, but thought that might be taking my deer revenge a little too far. Here is one of my beautiful purple coneflower blooms: