Puppies...

Well aren't they cute....when they are sleeping.  

Charlie has turned out to be no different than the other 3 in their puppy stages, however, he is really giving us a run, literally, for everything.  Now, yes, all 4 have definitely done their share of damage...Peaches and Shadow were puppies together and daily Jeff and I would return home from work/school to find destruction to clean up, including the stuffing from two, yes I said two, couches.  Thankfully they were from DI (Goodwill) so we weren't out much.  When we lived in Ogden we were renting a townhouse and came home to find a hole, the size of a small salad plate, in the middle of the carpet that they apparently decided to eat as a snack...really !?! you couldn't have eaten it in the corner where we could at least cover it up for a while.  Then we moved to Oregon, and destruction still happened, including the hot cocoa incident, where I had made a package for our families stockings stuffers, left my office door open while at work thinking they were out of their reach, and came home to find close to 20 packets of hot cocoa opened, scattered and licked into light beige carpet.  I laugh at that now but at the time it was so not funny.  They eventually outgrew the puppy stage and we didn't worry too much, until we sadly had to say goodbye to Peaches.  Shadow was a lonely dog for a while, and eventually decided he needed a playmate, aka Copper.   We got Copper when I was pregnant with Ethan and really out of all the dogs Copper was by far the least destructive.  As Shadow was getting older and had his hip problem he was unable to get around as well so he wasn't able to show Copper all the fun thing he could have destroyed and other than coming home to an irreparable tear in the armrest of the love seat and stuffing all over the living room as well as him getting sick with diarrhea on the since replaced carpet, he wasn't a bad puppy.  Copper was also enthralled with the little thing that was making funny noises and moving all over so he wasn't concerned with much else...and I was also always home.  Then came Charlie...cute, yet tests me daily, Charlie.  He is one fast dog.  Ethan is learning that he has to keep his bedroom door shut all the time so that Charlie doesn't take off with one of his toys or stuffed animals, and sadly he has lost quite a few toys because of this.  Some of Charlie's favorites have been, or still may be, shoes, the soaker hose for the garden, any food from the kitchen counter or table including cooking food in a skillet on the burner, a knife, dirty clothes, and two small dinosaurs, which both he of course had to throw up on the carpet at 3 am on different days...but we love him anyway and hope that the puppy stage will soon be over.

Along with his taking off with things, let us not forget the broken front window.  We are replacing the window this Tuesday and so we had to take the trailer to Lowe's today to pick it up.  Since we didn't want to drive my car on our newly placed lawn to get the trailer, Jeff jimmyrigged us a trailer hitch of sorts to use the 4wheeler.  He makes me laugh...

 

and if the 4wheeler is running we know where Ethan will be.  Love his thumbs up!