Those of you who felt safe in the knowledge that we’d never post an Old Spice ad on our blog must feel stunned and betrayed right now…
All posts by Peter
When Puppies Attack!
In the interest of fairness, the powers that be have requested I give equal cuteness time to Candidate Pup #2, and we don’t have a movie, so:
Those of you who haven’t voted, go for it!
My Stocking
By the way, we had a fine Christmas. I got handkerchiefs in/with my stocking. But of course, being our household, they didn’t come folded in a pile, but in a flurry of cranes, Samurai helmets and other origami and napkin folds. One forgets how truly spectacular a flock of hankies can be.
The Puppies Strike Back
We visited the puppies again today. They have increased even more in cuteness and most of them are now busy making trouble. The tricolours are the most troublesome, followed by the lightest merle and the chicken-clucker from last time.
What do we mean by troublesome? Oh, you know, attacking shoes, marauding fingers, mauling pant cuffs, stealthily dispatching rogue and potentially dangerous ears of sleeping siblings, frenetically attacking speaker wire and power cords. Anything will do really. And their bites are the real deal now, with their tiny needle teeth.
Hershey, their mom, dropped by for a quick visit, but she can barely stand their wicked ways. A quick, black fly-like feeding to drain her slowing milk supply and she’s out of there.
Many loved to be cuddled. Even the most placcid can, when all of her siblings are sleeping, turn teddy bear killer.
Jon was a little less at ease this time around, not because of any individual pup, but by the wave of them, always in motion. He was charmed by their yips and whines, as they expressed themselves.
Three more weeks to go…
Huh…
David Barker has an interesting fact for us, with a picture to boot (good Internet research, Mr. B!)
I suppose it looks like Jon, if you add glasses. Darken the hair. And cut it a bit. Maybe you have to be there in person… 😉
First Visit with the Puppies!!
We drove up and visited the puppies for about an hour yesterday. At four weeks old, they are just starting to be social, and gain personality. They play for 5-10 minutes, and then you turn around and they’re in a pile asleep. But the pile is never still; someone is always jockeying for a better spot. So 10-15 minutes later, everyone is suddenly up and fully awake.
They’re just figuring out how to play, and some are better than others…but neither their teeth nor their bite strength is enough to do any harm yet. The yips and yelps will come in a couple of weeks.
They are about 3-4 weeks from Max Q (in engineering: maximum cuteness). Jon’s left hip was bothering him, so it was hard for him to be comfortable and cuddle the pups (he did sing a song to one of the pups), but there were one or two that didn’t mind being hanging out with us. Who can say at this early point, but they’ve got our attention…
One gross of puppies. Actually there are 17 puppies more or less in this picture (some are under the wooden lip)
The Thing with Two Heads (And Two Extra Paws)
The two pups who like hanging around us. The one on the left happily clucked like a chicken while we held her.
The pups are so (relatively) big that poor Hershey (mom) has to stand to feed them. This scene is not nearly as placid as it looks.
More Firsts
Some Jon news from the last couple of (eek!) few weeks:
Jon is playing intramural wheelchair hockey at school (he’s on the Canucks). I watched a recess game a week before and it’s nuts. The huge wheelchairs block almost any view of the ball for all but those in the midst of the action. I can’t imagine how Jon will be able to pick this up visually, but he’s had two games so far. They lost the first one, no comment on the second. I’ll get some pictures, but I wanted to let him to get accustomed to the frenzy first.
Jon finished the first half of his Grade 3 reading course and he’s onto the second book. With each textbook in the series, the text gets a bit smaller, the leading (space between lines) a little tighter, the amount of text per page larger and larger. And Jon continues to read it at school without any magnification help from his CCTV! He’s starting to flow whole lines together. It’s really nice. Vision comes and goes, but given that there there is a growing fluidity.
Another first: Jon wanted to try out an escalator the other day. So Laura took the elevator with an empty wheelchair while Jon and I took the escalator. I gave him a bit of quick coaching and on he went with a huge grin on his face. Then he insisted on going back down on the down escalator(harder, since I have to be behind to lift him, and he could span to reach the two handrails) and then back up again, even spontenously jumping at the top transition (I was holding him at that point). No wonder he thought that they’d be selling tickets for it!