...cycle?

We've got a new routine...instead of my dear happy feet and S having to wait for me on our night walks, I've started to cycle really slowly next to them....or double back for them if i get too far..
It works out great since A now no longer has to wait for me catch up with them...and she loves chasing after me on the bike!! I love that it gives her a great cardio work-out!

Don't have any photos of A chasing after my bike...but here're some photos of A at the dog run last weekend and O with his new friend....

... go for a mud spa?

A just turned 1! My lil’ gal is all grown up now…..almost!

Today, someone at the dog park discovered a new dog breed- a bicolor golden retriever – part gold, part mud! Ahhh….a beautiful pool of muddy waters amidst lush green surroundings and lots of new friends…a great beginning to a first birthday!

If only it wasn't so difficult to get all that mud out of her beautiful fur after all that!

….. get a plushie?

My dear A has decided that she likes plushies. She picked my poor cow plushie off the shelf and off came its horns, nostrils and tail. Unfortunately, it didn’t last more than 2 days, and when the stuffing showed, the poor plushie went into the bin.

After searching on the internet, we found plushies for dogs that were supposedly tested on other dogs and even tigers! The only problem was that we had to ship it in from US since they didn’t have it here in Singapore. So we made the order and waited almost 3 weeks before it arrived. We had expected something the size of our palm, but to our surprise, the plushies turned out to be bigger. Guess we didn’t look at the website closely enough!

Well, she took a while to warm up to her new toys, but now, she loves them!

Here’re photos of A’s new lobster and alien plushie!

…… cook for your dog!

A’s growing up to be quite the fussy eater! I fear she’s learnt that there are more yummy things out there than kibbles. So after one week of A picking at her food, we decided to change her over to home-cooked food. First up was gathering recipes and cookbooks from our friends, then off to the supermarket. We decided to go with the cookbook with simpler instructions and preparation first since I’m far from a gourmet chef and we hardly even have time to cook for ourselves anymore these days.

A’s first home-cooked dinner was pasta with minced pork, tomatoes, long beans and grated parmesan cheese. And, boy, she loved her new food! Since then, we’ve tried some other recipes like fish with rice and asparagus; chicken with potatoes, peaches and grated carrots; and chicken with rice, barley and long beans. We even tried to bake some peanut butter cookies for her. In fact, I think it's my first attempt at baking cookies. Hahaha, so the cookies turned out just too big to be bite-sized and really quite bland to the human palate, but strangely, she lapped it up. For all the effort put in cooking for her, it has really been gratifying to watch her finish up all her food and licking her bowl clean.

...learn to use a REAL camera?

As mentioned in my previous post, we bought a SLR in order to take better pictures of A in action. It’s been quite a learning experience, graduating from the convenience of a compact point & shoot to the complexity of having to take full control of the camera settings!

S has been reading all sorts of articles on exposure metering, white balance and depth of field, most of which unfortunately goes right over the top of my head! I’ll readily admit there are times when I wished getting a better camera would magically lead to nicer photos and all I had to do was press the shutter release. However as the saying goes, reality bites. So while we’re slowly exploring all the manual controls available on the camera, we still resort to the programmed modes like the Aperture-priority and sports modes for those occasions where time is of the essence. Below are some examples from our recent, not-so-disastrous efforts!

…… get a new camera?

We must be going dog-crazy, but we’ve just acquired an entry level digital SLR for A. For common-folk like us who just want to be able to take reasonable-looking photographs and videos for keepsake, a digital SLR was quite a step up and I hope, not an overkill. To assuage my guilt for buying this expensive new toy, it is going to be my birthday present for S and A whose birthdays coincidentally fall within days of each other.

The main reason for the new camera was to get clearer pictures of dear A in action! It was just so difficult to use our old point-and-shoot camera to capture those moments of A bounding across the grass, chewing her Frisbee, giving us a quizzical look, swimming and playing with her friends! One moment she’s in the frame, and the next, a blur streak on the taken photograph. Another precious ‘Kodak’ moment appears, and before we could click on anything, the moment had passed again! It was absolutely frustrating!

Of course, some time and effort is going to have to be invested in learning how to use our new camera in the first place. Thank goodness for the Internet! We did a little research on the web, joined a photography forum to canvass opinions, chatted with friends and off we went hunting for our new toy. I don’t expect it to solve all the problems we’ve had so far, and we’ll almost certainly still have some blurry photographs, but for now, let the experimenting begin!

….go for a swim at the beach!

I confess I’m more of a couch potato than a beach babe, but we decided to bring our little one to the beach a few weekends ago to test out the saying that GRs are born to love the water and swim!

I don’t think I’ld ever have woken up at 6am on a Saturday morning otherwise, but I thought we should try to get there nice and early when the beach is more likely to be deserted so that she could swim to her hearts’ content without having to worry about scaring other people or their kids! We reached the beach before 7am and she simply loved every minute there! Running around the soft sand (albeit a tad littered with plastic bags and stuff) and shoving her little snout inquisitively into the sand, she was quite a hilarious sight.

She walked along the shoreline tentatively, jumping back when the waves came in, finally settling on a little spot that was sheltered and the waves gentle. We went barely knee-deep into the water and tried to gently cajole her in, but she flatly refused. It took her instincts of retrieving to finally get her into the water and swimming, and all we actually needed to do was to throw her tennis ball into the water and get her to ‘Fetch’!

We had a blast the next hour playing fetch in the water, trying out her first doggy paddle swimming strokes and running with abandon on the sand.

Here’re a couple of pictures of her at the beach!

….. read food labels carefully?

One of the first decisions we had to make after bringing A home was what to feed her. There many brands of dog food and the advice that can be found on the internet can be rather overwhelming. Should we feed kibbles or wet food, or perhaps, whip up a delicious home-cooked meal?

A was only 12 weeks old when we brought her home, so we continued her regular brand of kibbles before we tried mixing in our own choice. We started off with a brand she was already on, then we decided to switch her over to another as Vets supposedly recommended it.

Quickly, we learnt to read food labels more carefully and found out more about what those ingredients meant. We were shocked to learn that out of the top 5 ingredients, there was only one “pseudo-meat” – chicken by-product meal, which is basically the ground up whole carcass of chicken, including the neck, feet and innards! Two of the other ingredients were different iterations of corn, which is an extremely poor source of proteins for dogs due to its indigestibility. Dried beet pulp and artificial liver flavoring rounded up the top five. Hardly stuff to whet the appetite of a born carnivore!

The more we learnt, the more questions we had – how much protein content was good, how about glucosamine and omega oils, should we pick chicken or lamb or fish. One thing’s for sure, our quest to find the best food that we can buy to feed A is still a work in progress. Now after 4 different brands, it’s time to try to change her kibbles again because of a possible skin allergy to chicken. Perhaps we’ll try a fish-based kibble, so do we pick a single fish or allow a few different fish types? Choices choice choices…

.....get a new best friend?

I recently welcomed the latest addition to my family – Miss A. She is pure sunshine trotting on 4 legs, always cheery and trying to get into some trouble! Some friends just can’t stop gushing about what a sweet little pup she is, while others who do not share my passion for dogs wondered why in the world I would love having a little ball of fur rampaging through the house, trying to chew on anything she can reach with that mouth full of pearly whites!

While I do not subscribe to the overly romantic notion that dogs are pure love and can do no wrong, perhaps the reason people love their dogs so much, is that dogs are like innocent children playing at the playground, ALL the time! Just like humans, dogs are highly emotive creatures. As I’m typing this, A is letting me know that she’s bored that I would rather tap away at my laptop than play fetch, or go for a walk. But hey, she’s also glad to just lie and sleep at my feet till I’m done. Of course, sometimes she’ll have no qualms about climbing onto my chair and with her paw on my arm, urge me to go for that walk!

Some might think its sadly anthropomorphic to ascribe emotions to animals like dogs, but anybody who has had any contact with dogs will tell you that they are just as capable of emotions like joy, sadness or jealousy (probably in that order!).

I'm looking forward to our little adventures and life together!