A dog's life

It's been a long time since the last post. Hey, we've been busy. The lab news, though, is all good. Well, mostly good.

April has settled in to our family and our routines. She is clearly the Alpha dog, whopping the stuffing out of Pepper every single day, but Pepper doesn't mind too much. He loves playing with April, and April certainly has boundless energy. The two chase each other all around the kitchen and family room, zooming at what seems to be a hundred miles an hour.

Now, anyone who knows labs knows that they have an innate need to run each and every day. Unfortunately, the weather doesn't always cooperate, and two labs running around a yard make a whole lot of muddy footprints, I'll tell you. But what happens when labs don't get to run off their steam every day? Let's see... Recently, we came home to black blobs all over the family room. It seems that ink cartridges (stolen from my desk) must be nice and crunchy because they were crunched up on the floor, there were black stains all over (and they don't come out!), and there was one very guilty-looking girl leaving black footprints all over the place. About a week later, we thought we'd come home to the same thing again, but this time it wasn't ink; it was a pound of coffee, the bag ripped open and the grounds all over. Hey, at least that mess vacuumed up!

So what is a lab owner to do to let the beasts run off energy when the weather or circumstances don't cooperate? Doggy daycare! I can't believe I didn't know about this before. A new business opened up right near our house, and it's a great place. They do dog daycare, boarding, grooming, and classes, but the best part is that for $15, I can leave a dog there to play for five hours - plenty long enough to exhaust the pooch, thereby leaving us with a perfectly behaved dog who has no desire to chew up my house or get into mischief.

The picture above (Pepper on the left, April on the right) is typical for the "after daycare buzz." It's good to be a dog in our house.