Lucy Blog - Lucy at 15 months

This month has a couple different topics in it, and I separated it mainly due to the number of videos that are here, as they load really slow on the main Lucy Blog page.

First topic is Lucy at the beach. At the end of August, we were coming back from Brittany and stopped at a beach south of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic Ocean. I am still working on my Brittany blog (we didn't do tons of stuff) but I wanted to go ahead and add these to the Lucy blog. The beach was HUGE, both length and width. It was low tide, so the beach seemed even wider than normal. You can also see in the background of the first video, that there are tall dunes (with very soft sand) that you have to get over to get from the parking areas to the beach. Here we met up with a golden retriever who played quite well with Lucy.

Lucy has also decided that she is okay with water now! Our first few times at the beach, as soon as the water would come up close to her, she would run away from it. She has been getting more and more into the water, but this is the first time that she put more than just a foot in! At one point while playing with the retriever, it ran a bit further into the water and Lucy followed, and then she figured out that she couldn't really touch the bottom and had to turn around and swim just a little bit to hit land again. I guess we may have to invest in a life jacket for her.

Then we had the opportunity to meet up with Lucy's brother, Pogo. Pogo lives up near Brittany but they happen to be in Toulouse for a few months for some training. So we met up with Pogo and his "adoptive" parents. It is amazing how much alike they are (look at those tongues!!). Hopefully we can meet up with them more often now that the weather is getting a bit cooler.

And it is SO interesting how they play together ... based on this picture, you would think that Pogo was killing Lucy, but it was all great fun.

One of the great things about living in France is that dogs are more readily accepted than in the US in businesses. Mind you ... Italy is better than France at this, but France isn't too bad. While there are places that will not allow dogs, there are plenty that do. Thankfully for us, one of them is just around the corner and is one of Lucy's favorite places to go. We went there for dinner the other night and snapped a couple pictures of Lucy up on one of the chairs. Mind you, she is on the floor most of the time, but we brought her up for a few minutes at the end after we finished our coffee.

Sometimes, we try to get nice "portrait" pictures of her ... like the yearly school pictures that we had taken as kids. Here is her 15-month birthday picture.

And she goes from that picture to this one in an hour! We went to a nearby church and met up with a Cocker Spaniel friend of Lucy's ... they played quite a bit in a small area of grass. Unfortunately, there were a few mud puddles that they decided to run through, and then got up on this raised gravel/sand area. So what do you get when you mix sand and water? A puppy that has to go into the bathtub when she gets home!

Here we have Lucy and Potter again at the puppy recess that we take her to on Sunday's ... they are such great playmates!

After months without rain, it has now been raining off-and-on for about a week. We decided that since we should be able to take much longer walks this fall/winter than last year (when she was very young), we may end up taking walks in rainy conditions. So we thought it might be good to pick Lucy up a raincoat for the rainy season. She actually took to it better than we thought she would, and it didn't seem to bother her at all wearing it. Her underside still gets a little wet, but it makes drying her off at the end of the walk so much easier!

At this week's puppy recess, there weren't very many smaller dogs and almost none of the "regulars" were there. But you may have seen Lucy play with Romy before, a little female Beagle. She was REALLY small the first time Lucy played with her (also alone that day), but the last few weeks, Romy has been in the "puppy" area instead of the "small dog" area. This week, Romy. came over and played with Lucy and they really had a great time. Lucy wasn't too rough with her, but still played aggressively. It is funny to watch her ... she will have Romy pinned on the ground and then Lucy will just hop up and let her go! You'll also see a few pictures with Praline, a little fluff-ball that showed up in a little rainsuit herself!

And lastly ... we have been trying to train Lucy to retrieve a ball. She likes to run after the ball and inside she will bring it back. But outside, she will chase and catch it, and then drop it right there without bringing it back. The other day, she was playing with a black poodle and was actually chasing and returning that ball. So we got a new ball that is similar to the one that the black poodle plays with, and this morning, she actually did a good job at returning with it.