Hi Marie! It sounds like you're having a great time and we'll be looking forward to those toddler pictures... Your baby Bouv. here is doing well. I consider all puppy accidents to be the fault of us humans for not paying attention/reading the signals right. It takes a bit of time to adjust to read her particular language so some accidents were expected... Today was a very mellow day here. Misty has now fully accepted Phoebe as a member of her pack - she initiated her into the joys of head wrestling today...:-) Head wrestling is a game she and Copper invented. The only rule I enforce is that the big beast has to keep her feet on the ground. The way it works is Misty is on higher ground (the lounger on the back porch in today's case) and the big dog is standing on the floor beside her. Misty pounces on the big dog's head and that dog tries to grab her and flip her over. They then proceed to wrestle back and forth until one of them tires of the game. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera with me so didn't get any pictures, but maybe some of you remember the pictures of her and Copper playing on the loveseat. The same thing was going on with Phoebe this moning on the lounger on the back porch. Barb was here today. She and Phoebe got along very well and they had a vigorous game of chase-me (Barb pretended to chase Phoebe and Phoebe joyously raced around the paths...) We all went for a walk past the library to drop off some books. I like this picture, in part because the sign on the library window says Laugh Out Loud - a comedy reading program for kids - seems appropriate for Phoebe! Here's the classic Woody's Doggie Holiday Camp picture from this afternoon (just after this picture Phoebe nuzzled my waist with her head, rooted in the training pouch with dog cookies that I'm wearing, and absconded with a cookie or two! I handn't realized the pouch was unzipped... She's a smart dog. Misty and Phoebe are definitely much mellower together now. When Randy got home tonight, we went for the third walk of the day. Zoe (yearling Rottweiller) was out on her driveway so introductions were made. Phoebe was skittish but eager; Zoe was dubious :-) A generous dose of cookies was applied all round. It takes more than a strange big hairy dog on her driveway to keep Zoe away from her cookies! So Phoebe had a good day at camp today :-)

Our oldest son lost his step-son in Afghanistan two years ago around Christmastime. He was in his mid-twenties and left two little boys. At the funeral, one of them kept saying "When my daddy wakes up". The funeral was in a little country town, but the road on which the procession took his body to the funeral was lined with flags and people standing out in the cold to pay him and our family their respects. If/when a family suffers this kind of loss, seeing what would have been total strangers come out of nowhere to share the grief is an especially poignant and meaningful experience. It does matter and it is remembered.

Reading all these responses, I'm just amazed! We've been camping for years, and have never encountered most of these problems at all. We usually go camping at one of the state parks in Cape Cod and other parts of New England, where the sites are roomy, private, and very quiet. But now, we're spending two weeks at a 'resort campground' here in CT. The sites are small, the people are up all night partying, they go to bed and leave their fires burning. But what really gets me is that we've got all kinds of kids coming over to our site and no sign of parents. We have kids ourselves, who want to play with these others, so I can't toss them out completely. But the first day I was going seven different directions as they tried to untie our dogs, snoop through our cupboards, asked me for snacks, drinks, and even for dinner. I lined them up and told them the rules for playing at our site, and a seven year old girl told me that her mother says she doesn't have to obey strangers, a boy points out that his big sister is developmentally delayed and I'll just have to watch her, 'cause she doesn't understand. Last night at nine o'clock, the seven year old girl was knocking on our camper door. She'd been watching for us to come back, she said, and she wanted to come in and watch a movie with our son now. What kind of a parent lets their kid go alone at night to a camper they can't even see from their site, and sit inside with people they've never met?

First: thanks KT for the post - but the link didn't work today, not here. Kinda hard to dredge all the trash out of orbital space, ain't it, Vgkg? "Who has used nuclear weapons in the past, who has the largest arsenal pointed at other countries, who is expanding use of such weapons (including on conventional weapons), who is talking about deploying such weapons into space, who has hundreds of military bases in some of the most politically sensitive places in the world, and who is acting unilaterally and pre-emptively?" Why, al Qaeda and al Qaeda's helpers, of course. Don't mistakenly exclude "tests" from "uses." And don't exclude "cells" from "bases." Never mind: NOTHING they hit is EVER a "holy site," is it? There goes "religion" again! The "zombie themes" sound SO much more Soviet than American - but we're getting there, all in good time, my pretties, and our little dogs, too... Gee, just like in Hollywood's movies, before long we can expect on our own continent - overdone dead zones. Maybe we should invite Elena over here for a "before" tour, with an open invite for an after tour of the same spots...eventually, some preacher will take up the cue and tell us all what we should do...and we'll do it...or else...again, never mind: preachin'z already happenin'.