and her name is Sammie. Yep, she is a energetic yellow lab and she is all puppy. She is growing like a weed. She is only 4 months old and now much bigger-weighing in at 48 pounds, but she has not grown into her body and bumps into everyone and everything, and thinks it is your fault.
She is a smart one though, for the most part. Sammie already knows how to sit, stay out of the garage, shake hands, wait to eat until she's told it is okay, and fetch. I want to teach her how to turn around in circles next (since she already always does it. I just have to figure out how to get her to do it on command.)
Sammie is an outside dog. To stay warm we have a dog house for her with a heat lamp and blankets. Problem is, Sammie does not like sitting on the hard cement in front of the sliding glass doors so she will pull her blankets out of her house and drag them across the patio to the window. When Mark comes home he puts the blankets back in her house. Sometimes he has to put her blankets in her house 3 times a day, but Sammie is persistant and will drag them right back out. On several occasions we would come home late from somewhere and Sammie's blankets were not in her house for bedtime. We would find the pile of blankets right outside her door waiting for Mark to put them back in her house-she had drug them back to her house. Apparently she doesn't like sleeping in a doghouse without blankets either. Crazy dog!
Daily our farm cats play red light/green light with Sammie. Sammie will sit somewhere on the patio and the cats, one at a time, will take turns crawling to the planter box. If Sammie turns around "red light"! The cats freeze in place. Once Sammie turns back around the cats hurry as fast as they dare to their desired perch. Just like the childhood game, there is a consequence for getting caught moving on a red light. If they get caught, Sammie will entergentically chase them until they wished they had never started playing in the first place.
Sammie is very much a puppy and likes to chew on anything she can get her mouth on: BBQ brush, gas hose to grill, lawnmower parts, doormat, ground cover. She finds garbage from all around and brings it back in the yard. It is a full time job cleaning up after her!
