As Daisy approaches her first Christmas, I’ve been thinking about how much she’s developed. She’s no longer that timid little thing who used to get so overwhelmed by groups of kids or other dogs that she would squat for appeasement pees; now she’s right in there loving the attention. Her confidence when meeting others has filtered through to Monkey, who had become downright fearful during that brief period of being a solo dog.

During her first month with us it was often a struggle to get her to eat her meals, so much so that we designated a room as her private “sensory deprivation restaurant” – a place where there’d be nothing to distract her from her food. Any time we let her have a novel new treat we had to set aside plenty of time to let her play with it first; it took her about 20 minutes to get round to eating her first chicken foot. All that has changed; she has a fully developed Beagle appetite and can dispatch any food item faster than Monkey, even though he has larger and more powerful chewing gear.

She’s our cuddliest Beagle by far; if she’s going to have a nap, she’ll find a humie lap or snoozing Monkster to curl up on, and often prefers to snuggle when she gets a chew toy she really likes.

She is however thoroughly spoiled. Spoiled by us of course, but also spoiled by Monkey. I can tell from her interactions with other dogs that her puppy license is starting to expire, but the Monkster remains very protective and indulgent of her. If she wants a toy he’s got, it won’t be long before he lets her have it. A couple of days ago they both snook into a fenced (supposedly Beagle-free) part of the garden; I announced a biccie scramble to recall them and while Monkey was by my side in a flash, Daisy couldn’t find her way out and began to panic. Biccies were on the ground right under his nose, but Monkey left them untouched to help me rescue Daisy. I hope Daisy realises how lucky she is to have such a gentle and caring big brother.

One thing she certainly doesn’t realise, or at least has no desire to respect, is the need to keep her nose out of our food when we’re having a sofa snack. Rules, boundaries and limitations? Not for Daisy if you don’t mind, and if you do mind, well they’re still not for Daisy. She’s more of a food pest than Beanie ever was, despite us never once giving her food scraps from our plates. We are slowly winning this war, but it is a struggle, and it’s not helped by the fact that she’s so cute.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Christmas, but I am looking forward to it this year with our newly restored team of two Beaglets.

Daisy has just gone through her first Halloween / Guy Fawkes Night combo, and she’s coped rather well. I made a point of playing recordings of firework displays when she was very young which may have helped; we’ve also been having thick low cloud cover for the last week or so and that has damped both the sound and visuals from distant fireworks. Perhaps the biggest factor that’s helped Daisy cope though, is Monkey’s completely chilled attitude to it all; a big volley of whizz-bangs kicked off while he was having a pee in the garden and he just carried on as though nothing was happening.

For much of his early years Biggles was similarly bombproof, but later on Beanie’s growing fears convinced him that maybe there was something to worry about after all; it’s definitely a good thing to keep the whole team feeling calm during this annual gauntlet.

Of course there are other things that can get Beagle pulses racing at this time of year. On their Halloween teatime walk we rounded a corner and nearly bumped into two Tyrannosauri Reges (I think that’s the plural form). They were a bit shorter than the ones in the Jurassic Park movies – only around 6ft tall – and they made squeaking sounds as they walked because various bits of them seemed to be made of inflatable vinyl. Daisy also made squeaky noises as she passed them, even though she has no inflatable components. Monkey didn’t squeak but after taking a second or two to process what he was seeing, he did release a couple of wooflets. Wooflets are what comes out of Monkeys when a full howl is not required, but a bit of pressure must nevertheless be released; sort of a woof version of hiccups. The Tyrannosaurs didn’t react to the squeaks or wooflets, so nothing further came of the encounter.

There may not have been any legit scares over the last week, but there were still moments of horror. One of them happened during a particularly heavy poo drop from the Monkster. Just as he squatted, Daisy felt the need to tangle the leads, putting her lead right in the path of the falling poo bombs. I had one of those slow motion Jean Claude Van Damme “Noooooooooo!” moments as I tried to get Daisy’s lead out of the drop zone, but to no avail. I had no gloves, and no means of wiping the worst of the soiling off Daisy’s lead, so I just had to get poop on my hands until I could get the two of them home and spend some quality time at our outdoor tap with soap and a pair of old towels. Why is it that you’re absolutely guaranteed to have an itchy nose when you’ve got Monkey-poo smeared all over your fingers?

I don’t know what those are Monkey, but I they’re not Tyrannosaurs because they aren’t squeaking as they walk.

Whizz bangs are going off but Monkey’s only interested in that bag of peanuts Mum’s just opened.

Halloween & Guy Fawkes: not a big deal if you’re a Daisy. Let’s hope it stays that way.

It’s fair to say that Daisy – like Poppy before her – is quite a small Beagle, but she’s made to seem even more diminutive when compared to her hulk of a brother. I haven’t weighed The Monkulus recently, but he was a shade below 20kg at his last weigh-in and must surely have topped that now, having muscled up continually over the last few months while remaining lean. To me he has the look and feel of a big dog, and this was confirmed when I ordered a new harness for him a few days ago; according to the size chart, he belongs firmly in the “Large” category. Even at his biggliest, Biggles only ever needed a medium harness, and I must admit I enjoyed selecting the proper big boy option from the dropdown list on the order form for Monkey.

For all his muscle and size The Monkster is still very much a little boy in his head, and most of the free space in that head is filled with nonsense. I think it’s quite common for humie children to go through a stage of running and jumping onto the bed for fear of having their ankles grabbed by the unseen monsters that lurk beneath. At almost 3 years old, Monkey has his own version of this; if he’s on the buffet in our lounge and wants to get onto the nearby sofa, the one thing he won’t do – under any circumstances – is step down onto the intervening floor; he must either cautiously stretch across the chasm of doom or be carried across like a big baby. I don’t know what dangers he imagines are lurking on that short section of floor, but the other night he attempted the stretch technique and it failed him disastrously. Just at the critical moment – with Monkey’s rear feet on the buffet and his front paws on the sofa cushion – the buffet slid further away. I was sat on the target sofa at the time and saw Monkey being stretched out longer and longer as he desperately tried to get enough purchase to bring his rear end forward to meet his front paws. It was a losing battle played out in slow motion, and it ended with Monkey belly-flopping unceremoniously onto the floor.

He was back up on the buffet like a shot before any dreaded floor monsters could get him, but he still needed to be on the sofa next to me and had lost all confidence that he could manage it himself. I got a whimper, then a paw, then more whimpers and those big, pleading eyes of his, and when I’d finished wasting my breath telling him that it was OK and that “look, Daisy can do it and nothing bad happens to her!”, I had to get off my bum, scoop him up in my arms and carry him over. It turns out that our old sofa was built well enough to take our combined mass dropping onto it; my attempt at a controlled touch-down was scuppered by my knees which really weren’t up for a weighted squat that late in the evening. I expected Monkey to struggle off my lap immediately on landing as Beanie & Biggles would have done, but there was no attempt to salvage any of his self-respect whatsoever; he just stayed cradled in my arms, letting me kiss his nose and tickle his tummy for a solid five minutes.

Daisy is very much lighter and seems to be immune to the floor-dwelling nasties that live between the buffet and the sofa, but she still has her own strange little habits. For example, most mornings when I open her crate she still won’t get out of it herself. She rolls onto her side, looking at me right in the eyes and wagging, and waits for me to kneel down and gently lift her out and into my arms, just as I did when she was a very young pup. She still squeaks and moans during the extraction process – again just as she did as a new pup – and of course I still squeak right along with her. It’s our little morning routine; it’s very silly, and I love it.