Best

I sit knee deep in dog hair in my car. There's dog hair everywhere in the house, including on the cats. The kids look like little yellow labs.

I keep picking up sticks out of the middle of the yard, but they keep coming back. I wrestle a 70 pound dog when I meet another dog on a walk, and sometimes I loose the fight. People are vigorously jumped on when they come to visit and the cats are constantly being poked by a big, wet nose.

BUT....

Daisy and Wil have become best buddies. Wilson will call her while he is eating and offer her his food covered hand to clean. Wilson will crawl up to Daisy and head butt her (his way of saying I love you). And Daisy will come and lay down next to him whenever she can. One of the things that Beth and I had discussed when considering adopting her, was the fact that it would be a very long time before we could trust her around the baby on the floor. We were wrong about that. Here you see him leaning up against her just petting and petting her.

Every now and then Wilson will roll over and lay down on Daisy.



Wilson's love of Daisy has even inspired Mia to get in on the action. Here you see her petting Daisy, but what you don't see is her giving her a hug and then a big kiss. Considering how afraid Mia has been of all things furry, this is huge. She walks around singing, "Daisy, Daisy".

Max has been leery of Daisy. She runs vigorously up to him, which scares him even though she has never once jumped on him. I have been trying to teach him to just stand his ground and everything will be fine. The other day, she came running up to him, and he very nervously stood his ground and told her, "Sit" which she promptly did. He burst into a huge grin and it was like a light bulb went off, "The dog will do what I say!" I just about emptied out the house of dog treats after that moment. Max has been strutting around the house commanding her to sit, no, leave it, and stay. He has even been assigned the nightly duty of giving her dinner. He tells her to sit and then he'll release her to go get her food.

Max has also found another very good use for Daisy. One of the dreaded wood boring bees showed up yesterday. He started to cry and pointed at it. Daisy looked over and then chased the bee away. Another one came and Max didn't cry, he just pointed at it and told Daisy to go get it, which she did.

In three weeks Daisy has taught my kids courage, confidence and the joy of just sitting and loving on a pet. I have been trying in vain forever to do this. And on top of that, she has proven herself to be a mighty protector of the kids. She just might be the best dog ever!