Bennie's almost Eleven Months

Time for another Bennie update.  He's passed through adolescence mostly...I say as he has an area rug flipped up to play with.

Since the last update Bennie got to stay home for two weeks while we went to the Cook Islands. We had Janna Hays from Mutts N Scruffs come over to feed, water and exercise him and had google play 2 podcasts a day for him. He had the living room and the kitchen during the day and at night he stayed in a a kennel at the front door. We let our neighbours know so if something happened to the house they would be able to get him easily. Of course nothing happened. One of our neighbours let us know Bennie wasn't out playing in the yard much while we were gone. We explained that he was going for walks instead since we could have him stay out unattended. Our neighbour really missed seeing Bennie and I think the feeling was mutual because he had a good visit through the fence while we did yard work. Janna said Bennie did so well while we were gone it was hard to believe he's still a pup.

It was funny when we got home because he was lying on his bed by the window and didn't come to check out who had come in. When he saw it was me he wiggled on over and came for a hug and shoulder drape so he could reach my face more easily. Then he did the same for Fred. He had a couple pee incidents (didn't have any while we were away!) but we were all resettling in to the routine. Bennie is much more huggy than any of our other dogs. Don't know if it's just because we're home more but he especially likes to spend time on Fred's lap which none of our other dogs did. He doesn't jump up on furniture but expects us to lift him up.

Not that everything is perfect. We got out of having a playful thief in our midst so we spend quite a bit of time trying to get back shoes and gloves. My new strategy is to just it quietly with a clicker and treats by the coffee table as that's where he takes his "finds". Every time he drops the find he gets a click and I show him the treat. Eventually he leaves the find and we trade. He get the treat, I get stuff back. It takes awhile but these are high value items for him.

In sadder news, I picked up Milo's ashes today. We might mix the ashes of all our dogs into the raised beds we plan to have in the greenhouse. We had good times with all of them in this yard and we plan to be here a while yet. I had meant to do this in our last phase of yard development while we had Milo and Duffy but forgot.

Speaking of the yard, it's been a long time since we did yard work with a puppy and it was ... different. There was a lot of helping from Bennie - mostly respreading of the raked leaves -  and play breaks.