Hi! It’s me, Phoebe.
Mom’s been pretty busy playing with the thing she calls a calendar lately. It seems to have something to do with the New Year which I think is pretty soon, though I’m not sure what’s up with that.
I’m pretty good at clocks but not so much calendars. There’s just a lot to keep track of!
I do know that I’ve been here for a little more than two years, now. A lot of things have changed!
First, it was just Sarah and me. She’s way bigger than I am and she used to chase me but doesn’t so much anymore, which is fine with me.
Just when I was starting to figure out how things worked around here, and believe that Mom and Dad would feed me every day, Luther came to live with us, too.
He was really scared when he got here. I think people were mean to him, too. He was so scared that he didn’t even like greeting people.
Greeting is one of our best jobs. Mom just let him get used to being petted and talked to in his own way and he’s gotten really good at it now.
Even though I’m the oldest, which I think is another of those calendar things, I’m also the littlest because Luther kept growing after he got here. Mom says she hopes he’s done!
Sarah and I help take care of Luther because he can’t see. I think he does a great job playing in the yard and going on walks. Getting in the car is hard for him but I’m pretty good at it so I go first to help him know it’s safe.
The last time Sarah and I went for our spa day, I got a makeover. I love my new haircut. I don’t itch nearly so much, which means I don’t need as much medicine, and Mom doesn’t bug me so much about the thing called grooming.
Mom has a new toy called an Instant Pot. I love it! Somehow, it means we get bone broth with our supper lots more often. I don’t really understand, but I think Mom was really glad to have it when I got hurt this fall. She said the bone broth would help me feel better fast and I feel great now.
I did have one of those things Mom calls learning experiences, though. Apparently, some dogs just aren’t nice, no matter how nice you are or how much you want to be friends with everybody.
Mom says some people are like that, too, but our job is to just keep trying to be kind to everybody and protect the people who need protecting. Newfoundlands are good at that. Mom says people could learn a lot from us.
I think we’re really lucky to have so many people to love us. It doesn’t make all the hard stuff that happened before we got here go away but it helps us remember that there’s a lot of good stuff in the world, too.
One of the new good things is what Mom calls painting. We started doing that not too long after Luther got here. We’ve done it more and more and Mom did a thing called graduating which seems really cool.
Sometimes Mom paints with just us. She plays music and sings along and tries really hard to make room for all of us on the floor. It’s fun!
Other times, our friends come to paint, too. Sometimes there’s crying and usually there’s laughing and there’s always a lot of talk about learning and something called healing which I think is like when my belly got better.
Dad is home more, too. He still works a whole lot but doesn’t go to the place called office as much.
I’m not sure what will happen this year. (I don’t think Mom is either, even when she writes in the calendar book!) I do know that Mom and Dad will love us and I hope our girls will come visit. They know lots about love!
We’ll all be hoping that your New Year will be full of the kind of love Mom calls Fierce Compassion. I’m pretty sure it makes the world better. We learn lots of things from her. Maybe she learned that from us!
Much love and a bit of toe licking, Phoebe
