Play Hard, Train Hard, Sleep Hard

Finally a day off from work and evening activities.  Although I love evenings spent with the kids and their activities, I know it's hard on the dogs sometimes.  


This afternoon was spent playing hard and having a nice long walk.  She loved it.  She is starting to walk very nicely on the leash - not a lot of pulling.  She does get very interested in what all the other people are doing and sometimes just stops, sits, and watches.  Too cute.  


Worked on the "wave" again today.  Starting on playing dead too.  Obie has the wave down and Envy is still a work in progress.  She has a lot more to learn.  


When she's tired, she'll take a nap wherever we are.  So this afternoon, she grabbed her itty bitty blanky and brought it into the office and crashed.  She fit on this blanket when she was 9 weeks old.  Now it's just a little square she carries around when she's tired.  


We're in the toddler stage of puppy-hood.  She always has something in her mouth and is extremely curious.  She's not much of a chewer (so we've been lucky with shoes) but she always finds paper, pieces of lint, her precious mulch, kitchen towels, kleenex, whatever and keeps it in her mouth.  And her mouth is cavernous!  Always pulling open her mouth to see what she is keeping in there.  Shees.

Envy asleep on her itty bitty blanky

By the way. . . . 
I'm pretty excited too today.  We bought our kids a new (used) piano.  We have an old bang-on piano that we were given free a few years ago from one of my husband's friends.  It's been ideal for the kids to practice on and we wanted to make sure that they would stay interested in music before investing any more money.  They've been at it for more than a year, so I thought it was a good time to give them a tuned, nice instrument to use.   We debated for a while while the gentleman showed us all the beautiful new and reconditioned pianos they had in the store.  He even showed us one that $240,000.  Yep, $240K.  He laughed as a I backed away from it.  We found some nice new ones that were in our price range too.  And then he showed us a nice Charles R Walter upright that was used, but restored beautifully.  


It sounded wonderful.  It comes on Tuesday and they will even take our old bang-on one back to see if it can be salvaged.  It's a Story and Clark upright piano and I finally looked up the serial number today and found that it had been built between 1949 and 1956.  That's a tough old gal and a lot of kids pounding away on the keys over all those years.  


Two things I liked about the Charles R Walter - they are built here in Indiana and they are the only non-Steinway brand that Steinway will display on their floor.  


I might even take lessons now.