Guard your pockets! Keep a hand over your coffee! And if you’re an intact boy Beagle, protect your balls! Daisy has suddenly gained the ability to get into, onto and under anything. Nowhere is safe from all-access, crazy Daisy!

I now have to close and lock Monkey’s crate the moment he leaves it, because if I don’t Daisy will sprint in there and pee right in the middle of his bed. She did exactly that three times last week, leaving the confused but stoic Monkster slumming it on a stack of crate mats while his luxury bed went back into the washing machine.

Daisy is now approaching 5 months old, and everything about her has been dialled up several notches. She’s faster and stronger, cheekier and more confident, but also more cuddly, more able to concentrate during her training sessions, and is an even better companion for Monkey, who seems to be happy and settled almost all the time now. She still provides her own soundtrack of squeaks and moans when she’s getting out of bed and hunting for the right toy in the lounge toy box; I’m hoping she’ll never stop because it’s incredibly cute.

After all the shocks that started the year, we’re feeling that we’re back to having a team of two Beagles to go forward with us. Ironically it’s probably that feeling of being ready to move on that has put Beanie, Biggles and Poppy more into our thoughts over the last couple of weeks. I guess you keep a lid on things when you’re still too close to the event, but then as time passes and you start to relax, you let that lid pop up just a little bit.

When the weather has allowed we’ve spent time just sitting in the garden, watching Monkey & Daisy playing and feeling that in some sense our first three pups are around us. The flower beds we built for them are overflowing with growth now. Beanie’s has hundreds of small, colorful flowers fizzing out from the base, with delicate sweet peas providing a more refined show of color higher up. To us it pretty accurately captures our excitable, waggy and (with us at least!) very gentle little girl.

Biggles’ bed is a mess of orange flowers and sunflowers; we’re still waiting for the tall ones to open but their huge leaves look like oversized floppy ears, and soon they’ll have big, silly yellow grinning heads to complete the picture. It’s absolutely Biggles, but it’s not quite how it was supposed to be. Susan bought a packet of “Zulu Prince” seeds and planted some in each of of the new beds. In two of the beds they’ve turned out as follows – which is how they’re supposed to look.

But in Biggly’s bed, they’ve turned out like this:

The logical explanation is that – purely by accident – a couple of rogue Venidium Orange Prince seeds made it into the seed packet at the factory, and by pure chance they both ended up going into Biggles’s flower bed. We prefer to think that Biggles took some time off from dinging his windchime and decided that he wanted a strictly orange and yellow color scheme for his display.

It goes without saying that we still struggle most with the abrupt end to Poppy’s short life; sometimes when we’re cuddling Daisy, or Daisy does something reminiscent of Poppy, the thought “that should be Poppy” creeps in. Susan put a variety of corn flowerseeds in her bed and in two other nearby beds. In Poppy’s bed alone, the corn chamomile quickly dominated and it looks like a sea of daisies with the occasional corn cockle & poppy breaking through. If Poppy wanted to signal her approval of our new girl pup, that would be one way to do it.

As I said earlier Monkey is pretty much his normal self now that he’s got Daisy as his partner in crime, but he still has one personality quirk that sets him apart from all the other Beagles we’ve known: he has absolutely no interest in getting into bed with us. Actually he has one other unique personality quirk: a strange obsession with licking up other dogs’ pee instead of just sniffing it. Oh yeah, and then there’s his habit of playing with treats instead of just speed-swallowing them, and his weird habit of scratching while standing on three legs. Come to think of it, Monkey has quite a few unique personality features, but the lack of interest in bed snuggles is one we wanted to correct. That’s why every night I place a dog biccie on my bedside cabinet, and bury it under the pillows each morning when the Monkster is first released from his crate. He’s got used to this early morning hunt-the-biccie game, and once he’s on the bed, he tends to settle, but still only above the covers, and then only at our feet. Perhaps when Daisy is older and we let her into bed, he’ll see more merit in morning snuggles.

To finish, more shots from the last couple of weeks.

I had some suitable wood left over from other projects so I made a new pair of agility jumps for Monkey. He jumps well, but he doesn’t half pull some funnny faces as he prepares for takeoff!

Monkey samples the first of this year’s homegrown raspberries, but of course he only chomps down on it once he’s thrown it around the garden for 5 minutes :)

Daisy looking cute

Nicking stuff from your Mum’s potting table is great  fun

But it can difficult to run around with it when your legs are still too short!

A moment of quiet contemplation as team Beagle goes for the day’s first trip into the garden

A deep cut of the garden’s wildlfower areas reveals a long-lost ball that really should get binned, but Daisy is instantly taken with it.

I replaced the disk of trunk that used to mark Poppy’s favorite posing location, with a small bench made from sleepers.

It’s an instant hit with Daisy, who finds a new use for it on hot days.

A brand new oinking pink pig makes an appearance and Monkey immediately hogs it, ruthlessly eliminating it’s oinking ability.

In response, we hear Daisy’s cover version of the classic Beagle song “He’s got my toy and it’s so unfair!”

It’s wrestling time..


..And all’s right in the Monkeyverse

Daisy has gained some impressive power-ups lately; she can now get up onto the sofa and despite her short legs she pushes Monkey into high gear during chases. The two of them have really learned to work as a team, something clearly demonstrated last week when they conducted a successful raid on the kitchen.

I’d let them both out into the garden for a few minutes and shut the kitchen door, forgetting to engage the full locking mechanism. I only left the kitchen unattended for the briefest of moments, but on my return I heard the sound of the door being opened, a couple of thumping noises, and caught sight of something small, fast and mostly black making a sharp exit into the garden. Monkey had opened the door, and Daisy had snook in and grabbed  something. I gave chase and saw Daisy scrambling down the patio steps with a bag of onions in her mouth. She was too short to carry the bag clear of the ground and as she struggled, whole onions and onion bits kept spilling out. I figured I had a chance of catching her but then her much larger accomplice shot past me like a bullet train and leapt off the patio, flying straight over Daisy and landing a few feet ahead of her. Daisy dropped the bag of onions and Monkey quickly picked it up before continuing down the garden at high speed; it was like athletes exchanging the baton in a sprint relay race. There was obviously no way I was going to catch Monkey, but I didn’t need to; he stopped as he reached his “laboratory” – that special place in the garden where Professor Monkey conducts experiments on his latest acquisitions, and he immediately fell for my oft-used “biccy scramble!” ploy. As soon as he heard that phrase, he abandoned the bag and ran towards me, sniffing for the biscuit fragments he assumed that I’d just dropped. Daisy came to join him, leaving me free to re-acquire the bag with its one remaining intact onion. Once I’d picked up that onion, I crumbled up a couple of biccies and threw them to where Little & Large were frantically searching, thus ensuring that the next use of “biccie scramble!” would have a decent chance of success.

I’ll finish this post with another dump of recent shots, including some of  Monkey perfoming rigorous tests on his newly repaired lunge-whip. This is his favorite toy, but it had been out of action for some time after over-zealous nibbling broke the cord at the end. It took just £2 to get a couple of meters of replacement cord, certainly the best purchase I’ve made in a while!

Since my last post Daisy has done a lot of growing. She’s bigger and heavier obviously, but she’s also more confident and gaining new abilities on a daily basis; only this morning she worked out how to get into Biggles’ old hammock-style chair. She’s become a much more satisfying chase partner for Monkey, going after him and using the occasional bit of strategic thinking to compensate for her lack of raw speed. Often when I’m watching them I can’t tell from one second to the next what the rules of the chase are or who’s leading, and I suspect that sometimes neither of them really know what’s going on either, but they always enjoy themselves and that’s the important bit.

A little while ago we moved Daisy out of her soft travel crate into a much roomier metal crate and installed a proper comfy bed in there instead of a practical & convenient but far from luxurious piece of “vetbed”. This was both an acknowledgement of, and a reward for, her much-improved bladder control, which she celebrated by sprinting into Monkey’s crate and doing a big pee right in the middle of his bed. I’m constantly comparing Daisy with Beanie and Poppy, and this was definitely from Beanie’s playbook. In general though, I think Monkey is gently training Daisy towards more Poppy-like behavior; he keeps inviting her for cuddles and little by little she’s responding.

I hope Daisy realises how lucky she is to have Monkey as a brother; he’s incredibly kind and generous towards her. When they’re both thirsty after a chase or wrestling match he usually gets to the water bowl first, but as soon as it’s clear she nees a drink too, he withdraws to let her go first.

He could easily win tug games but he doesn’t, prefering to keep the game going by constraining his strength to match hers. I might be tempted to call him the perfect gentleman, but there are some loopholes in his version of the gentleman’s code of conduct. For example, Susan soaked and froze an old tea-towel, making a soothing chew toy to help Daisy through her bad teething days, but Daisy has yet to experience it because tea-towels are definitely a Monkey thing. So, apparently, are girly pink puppy Kongs that have been chilled in the freezer.

I know I probably shouldn’t take this, but er…

I tell you what, I’ll just try it out for two minutes and then you can have it, OK?

What do you mean the two minutes are up already?

Fortunately I’d also prepared an adult Kong for Monkey and Daisy was happy enough with that one.

Just as Monkey is teaching Daisy some of his skills (like pickpocketing), she’s re-awakening the little 16 week old pup that still lives within him. Sometimes on evening walks he’s the one jumping up to grab his lead and chew it, and while they’re both very keen to perform their own re-enactments of the Andrex puppy adverts, he can unravel the whole roll in the time it takes Daisy to get just 30 sheets on the floor. As Susan noted, there must be a reason someone chose to call it “toy-let paper”.

I’ve dumped a ton of shots onto Flickr over the last couple of weeks, so I’ll finish by putting some of them up here, in no particular order: