The Tree

It's so easy to love my dogs. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people but mine are special. It's hard to know when you get a new dog how it will fit into the house and how you will feel about it. It doesn't go without saying that you will automatically bond with or adore a dog when it enters your home, sometimes the bond takes time, sometimes it doesn't happen at all. I put a lot of pressure on Cora from the moment she was born because she was essentially my only option out of this litter - if she didn't turn out the way I wanted I'd have to try again.

Thankfully Cora is easy to love. I'm not sure if it's because in her I see so much of each of her parents, or just because she has the right temperament to suit me. I've never owned both the parents of a litter before, I've never met Raimi or Archer's sire so I have no real idea how much of them is Halo and how much is their dad when it comes to temperament and habits. Every time Cora does something I think, "That is so Raimi" and sometimes it's "That is so Leeloo" and occasionally it's even both.

She is developing into a credit to both dogs and seems to be a balance of their virtues which means they each corrected what the other had wrong with them. To get this in the one puppy I really wanted to keep is a blessing. Then again, I knew Boy would do anything for me if he could. 

The one thing I had hoped would be corrected in Cora from Leeloo does not appear to be so. Cora is, after all my prayers to the doGs, developing Leeloo's ears. Well, one ear. Poor Cora - although I guess if you have to choose a fault then ears are pretty low on the list of things that can go wrong. We tried and tried to correct it but the stubborn thing just won't listen ... and for an ear that is some kind of feat. I suspect I'm the only one who will ever notice her wonky ear because some people can't even see it on Leeloo ... or perhaps I just obsess!

This puppy is hard not to love. She is so sweet, gentle, calm, smart and loving it's incredibly difficult not to want to look at her every moment. At night she lays her head on my knee and gazes into my face with her big soft brown eyes and a strange calmness comes over me. Perhaps she is hypnotizing me into believing she is never going to do anything naughty again ... or then again, maybe it's simple adoration.