Well, need I say that Coco Chanel is the most wonderful dog in the world?? I know everyone thinks that about their dog, but in this case it’s true! 🙂 Everyone else tells me this. She is the star at Soapy Dog where she gets bathed and at At Play With Sparky, where she goes for playcare.
Seriously, she has grown into a truly delightful creature. I will send pictures along. I am just learning some of the tricks of using my photo program, so I’m hoping to do that in the next couple of weeks. I’ll take some pics right after I groom her the next time. Yes, I learned to do this myself. “They” (the various labradoodle chat rooms I visited) say that you can groom them only a couple of times a year, but that just doesn’t work with her. She has a beautiful coat. Nice soft hair in lovely loose curls. But when she was changing from the puppy coat to
her adult coat, she ended up with huge mats behind her ears and on her neck. And that was after I had had her groomed by a professional a couple of times and she still came home with mats behind her ears.
This is probably the friendliest dog I’ve ever met. She’s always eager to greet people – hence the struggle with no jumping. She has never met a person she didn’t like or shied away from. Young, old, big, little, in wheelchairs, homeless, black, white, male, female… it doesn’t matter. She loves them – and they love her. She really is ideally suited to become a therapy dog, which is the next step for her once she gets her manners down pat. That was confirmed for me one day when I was downtown and a woman in a wheelchair wanted to pet her. She walked up quietly, sat down next to the woman and let her pet her head – no fussing at all. She just sat there and looked into the woman’s eyes.
Coco has added an element to my life that I never knew was missing. I have friends with dogs and I listen to how they talk about the human/canine relationship, but I never got it before. Now I do. Coco is a snuggler, so when we are settling in for the night, she’ll snuggle up in my arms and roll over on her back and just “relate”. She’s very good at communicating “scratch me here” or “rub my nose just this way.” She does the same thing each morning when we wake up. What a way to begin and end a day! Sometimes she sleeps at the foot of the bed, sometimes on the floor in the bedroom, sometimes in her crate. But she’s always close by and taking care of me. She has a ferocious bark which she uses liberally when someone walks by the house at night. That’s good. What’s not so great is that she uses the same ferocious bark at length whenever anything walks by her fence – another dog, a squirrel, someone on a bike… But I like that she is a good watch dog, so I’m reluctant to train that out of her.
She is a powerful, healthy dog – she hovers around 50 pounds, which is just what I hoped for. She’s not what I would call a finnicky eater, but she simply doesn’t eat if she doesn’t want to. I worried about that at first. Then I realized that some days she’ll eat twice and other days she may not eat at all. It’s just her way.
So, I guess that is the whole story. I hope you and your family are doing well. I know you had a couple of litters earlier this year, and I talked with Sophia Brooks who said you just had another one. Are your still getting mostly chocolates and blacks, or have you gotten other colors? I have to say that I keep thinking Coco needs a sister, but as long as Peepers is around, we’ll remain a Three-Girl Household.
Best regards.
Tena
