(40) The Feast de Resistance

It has been a wonderful Easter Day for all of us. We started the day by going to the Urbana Sculpture Garden for a walk. Beeks especially likes this park because there are new smells that he delights in finding when ever we go there. Today we noticed all of the beaver damage along the creek. Many trees have been chewed down and have created some dams along the way. The Park board has been working to unjam the creek and let the water begin to flow, but this continues to be an issue for this great park. So many trees downed and a lot of water backed up. Beeks is perfecting his art of rodent pouncing. At one point he looked like his cousin dog, Jesse James as he bounced in the tall grasses trying to catch some kind of critter. Jesse would have been proud.

When we got home, the dogs rested as Brad and I prepared for our egg hunt. It was fun to watch our neighbor girls play in their driveway in anticipation of the hunt. As you can see from the pictures, they wore their bunny ears for the event as well. They got excited as they came thru the path. Their eyes were looking to find all the colorful eggs we had placed in the yard. Before we would let them "go to it" we brought Beeker out for pictures. I'm not sure who was more skittish, Morgan and Maya or Beeker? A fun time was had by all, and all of the 46 eggs were found(We think).
The girls LOVE Chez so we decided to bring him outside after the hunt. He was so happy to just be out in the sun he didn't mind all of the attention he got. The cat does love the sun. I was surprised that as soon as the girls were finished with the hunt they were ready to explore our house. What I mean is that,I remember Easter Egg hunts, and when I was finished I wanted to see what was in my eggs, trade for other goodies and eat all the chocolate my parents would allow me. Not these girls. They were happy with the excitement of locating eggs and spending time outside. Then it was time to explore the house. Now, Morgan and Maya have favorite things to do when they come to visit my house and one of them is to play with all of my little tiny animals. I have turtles,frogs,birds,and lamas. Maya likes to line them up, play with them in imaginative ways. Today was no different. Shells are something else they like to play with. My shells get put to good use when the girls come to "Miss Sally's". Both Dogs settled down and the girls play together so well that we adults were able to spend time drinking coffee and talking! What a wonderful day.

Later Beeks and I played fetch and bring in the yard. Beeks likes to run after balls I throw but he doesn't especially like to bring them right back to me so he usually gets them and then lays in the yard looking at me sweetly. Therefore we have devised a system that allows a good game of bring and fetch. Beeks sits at a heel, I throw the ball, he fetches the ball and I call him back while holding a chew rope of another ball. He brings me back the ball so that he can get the rope. I throw the rope, he runs for the rope, I call him back, showing him the ball in my hand and so it goes. This works for him and I feel like he is following my command. It's a Win-Win situation. He's pretty worn out after about 7 rounds of this.

The feast de resistance for Beeks and Max today was the ham bones I gave them after I cut off the ham this afternoon. They were besides themselves as they sat hoping that a morsel would drop from the carving. When I actually got the ham cut and figured out that there was a nuckle bone attached to a part of the hip, I decided to give them each a little treat. A treat it was too. The drool was at full throttle by the time I got them outside. I sat watching them eat thinking, do you think they're happy or what? When they began to chew up the bone we took them away,with much resistance on their part. Both gave them up but with some trepidation on both of their parts.
This is about as good of a dog day as there can be.