Puppy Time = Welcoming Maxine To The Family

Last week we did a speed trip up to the middle of California to pick up the newest member of our family, Maxine.  Maxine is a pure-bred Great Dane puppy from Ca Euro Danes (in Oakdale, CA).  It’s a bit of a zoo here in the house sometimes but Maxine just turned 10 1/2-weeks so she can’t go outside at all yet.  So she has discovered the joy of meeting our cats and generally getting all over our adult (older) Great Dane, Quincy, who’s not loving all the attention.  But I think there’s understanding that Maxine is away from her brood so Quincy is fairly gentle and gets lots of attention from us, trying to stem the inevitable jealousy that comes from a new puppy.   

Here’s Maxine on her first truck ride on the way home: 

For real, about the only thing a puppy does right away is cause chaos, eat, sleep, knock things over and make messes.  But she is a fast learner.  Already this puppy is using the pads for #1 and #2 and not missing very often, but she does seem to have the idea that stepping in all of it is ok…creating a nice great big larger mess for me to clean up.  Such is life with a new puppy, especially a Great Dane puppy.  Right now she’s all energy when she’s not asleep…but with proper application of toys, cuddles, walks around the house for leash training and attempting to play with Quincy Dane…our girl can tire herself out nicely.  We’re happy to have her in the house and look forward to watching her grow into our family. 

We have not written (on a regular basis) for a bit, and that’s ok.  We’re not done writing and we’re not done traveling or adventuring.  What we are doing is taking time to work on the Adventure Base, which is older and needs fix-up work in lots of places to make it the home we want.  So, I’m doing work between travels.  We just got back from a camping loop of the western US which I’ll start writing about shortly, so there’s lots more travel with kids stories in the hopper.