Kiera and Magic
A day in the life of two contented snuggle bunnies… Read More
- All
- Awakening Inner Knowing
- Awareness Tune Up Challenge
- Cait and Me
- Dog Training
- Dogs in General
- Finnegan the Coon Cat
- Funnies
- Just Dogs
- Life
- Life of Riley
- My Dogs and Me
- My Favorites
- My Garden / Recipes
- Nature
- Nature's Grocery Store
- On Writing
- Podcasts
- spirituality
- Tech Tips & Product Reviews
- The Mail Bag
- Thought for the Day
Best Part
Cait and I have a longstanding bedtime tradition. She snuggles in, I sit next to her, and we talk about the day. We always start with Best Part, Worst Part, and Don’t Tell. Best Part is for talking about the best part of our day. Likewise for Worst Part. Cait came up with the Don’t Tell some years back when she’d desperately wanted to tell me a secret. It has morphed into sharing with each other … Read More
Dolphin Dreams
A couple of years back, Cait was facing some difficult changes. No amount of putting a happy face on how it would all work out made a dent. She was focused on the loss and the feeling that she couldn’t control what was happening to her. I watched my happy-go-lucky, optimistic daughter turn into a despondent worrier.
Having spent my professional adulthood looking deeply into people’s lives, I fully understood how, sometimes, it only took one life event to cause … Read More
My Garden Swans
I started my first garden when I was twelve; I went out to the back field and dug myself up a quarter acre. I’ve rarely missed a summer since. I do some of my best thinking digging in the dirt.
This picture is of two of my garlic plants nuzzling each other. Aren’t they beautiful!… Read More
What’s it all about, Alfie?
When Caitlin was little, she liked using me as her jungle-gym. She still loves to sit on my lap and cuddle, but lately I’ve been telling her she’s getting too big, and the weight of her is starting to hurt my legs. I make her sit next to me instead.
When Kiera was little, she liked to lean against me and use my feet as her personal headrest. As she’s grown, she’s gotten into the habit of lying on my … Read More
Aha Training Moment with the Help of Visualization
When I’m training, I’m always thinking about why Kiera does or doesn’t do what she does. I’m always trying to see if I can understand it from where she is and go from there. For example, once upon a time, I wasn’t having any luck getting Kiera to remain calm when people came over to our house. Whenever someone would arrive, Kiera would go into overdrive to make sure everyone in the house was safe for posterity. I’d tried the … Read More
10 Great Reasons to Have a Dog
Yesterday, I had the good fun of speaking with a terrific group of kids who were spending their week at Mahogany Ridge KidsCamp. It’s a camp where kids and their dogs get to play and learn together. Theresa Richmond, the camp director and trainer, (whom some of you may remember from Dogs of Dreamtime) invited me to give a talk on what it’s like to write about dogs.
As with training dogs, writing about dogs is best learned by … Read More
Kiera’s Herding Instinct Test
One morning, as I watched Kiera and Graidy zooming around the backyard together, it struck me how much of Kiera’s play was really herding behavior. Graidy would float around the yard like a piece of newspaper blowing in the wind– fluttering this way and that, skipping and hopping, twisting and twirling. Kiera would conserve her energy as long as Graidy stayed within a certain range. She’d stay in a semi-crouch position with neck stretched out and down, watching. Once he’d … Read More