This is a guest post by my foster-sister Blondie-Bear.

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NiceLady has been sick. I don’t know what’s wrong.  I know she feels bad.  And she falls over when she tries to walk.

I’ve been taking care of her. HairyFace helps: he does the little things like bringing her food and giving her medicine and getting her to the bathroom.  I’m the one who stays by her bed, watching, and thinking good thoughts to help her get better. I’m her nurse.

This morning Lady got out of bed and walked to the bathroom by herself. Cochise and Hairy were in the kitchen. Cochise heard the toilet flush, jumped up, RAN to the bedroom and stood staring at her, wide eyed: “What are you DOING!? You’re not supposed to be up by yourself!”

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We all had a good play time this morning. I was running with The Boys: that made HairyFace happy. He wants me to do more running.

It’s part of my job to be Playground Monitor, so when they’d start getting too rowdy I’d come galloping by, practically side-swiping them, and get them to chase me. And they would. The three of us would run like a little freight train all over the place until one of them (usually Drake) got tired and lost interest. Then we’d all wander around panting for a while.

Smokey always got stoked up again first. That boy has tons of energy! Sometimes Drake would go lean against Hairy’s legs and say “Save me from him, I’m tired!” One time Drake and Smokey ganged up on me and wore me out so I had to go to HairyFace for salvation. That made him laugh, but he shooed them away.

I’m big and I’m powerful, and I’m faster than any of them, but I run out of steam sometimes. Because I came down with a thyroid condition, it’s been a long time since I’ve had the desire to run. Now that I’m on medication I feel much better and am ready to resume my duties. But I’m overweight. Running will take care of that.

Yesterday was not such a nice day as today. It was a windy day, but we managed to have some fun. anyway:

We had SO much fun in the new play yard.  I walked out into the yard.  Then I realized … there was no leash!  I took off like a shot and went steaming down the hill.  I thought I was free to bolt off into the woods. Imagine my surprise when this silver meshy thing was in my way! But it’s OK: we have so much room to run now that it’s almost as much fun as breaking loose and running off.

Cochise got sick over the winter.  He’s been going to see his doctor through the summer. He hasn’t been feeling well enough to run much. But now he’s better. He ran and ran in that wide open space.

Then we went inside for dinner. After dinner the big lug went to bed and CRASHED. He’s so tired. Don’t tell him, but so am I, but I prefer to stay close to Doug & Marie, I’ll crash when they go to bed too.

Marie and I are highly involved in the care and rehabilitation of rescue dogs. We foster for local animal shelters and rescues.

Cochise was our very first foster dog. We fell in love with him (who could say ‘no’ to that face?), and could not let him go. The Shelter calls this “foster failure”. It is failure because while it is a win for the dog (who gets a home), and a win for us personally (who get a great dog) it does diminish our foster care capacity by one, thus making us that much less useful or effective to the shelter and their foster care program. Although, in Cochise’s case, he more than makes up for that reduction by being a superb mentor and interpreter to the foster dogs.

One of the things that caused us to fall in love with Cochise is that he is a talking dog. Yes, that’s right; a talking dog. He does not speak English (French nor Spanish either, for that matter), but he is quite clear in expressing himself, and once we learned to listen to him, we communicate with each other quite well. We do not speak his language — when we try he does that head tilt thing then glares at us — but we don’t need to: he has learned enough of our words that he understands us well. In fact sometimes I think he can read my mind because I don’t need to even SAY the word “bath” and he’s trying to disappear somewhere.

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