My little girl is growing up.

It's hard to believe, but I've had Piper (or Piper has had us, depending on your perspective) for more than three months now. And just when I've made peace with the fact that she's not going to reach the "upper-end-of-medium" size I was hoping for, it looks like she has another growth spurt coming on. Her skin around her neck is quite loose, and Hubby had to adjust her collar again today.

She was born on or around June 12th, so I take that as her official birth day. She'll be 24 weeks old on Tuesday, and if you count months instead of weeks, she's about five-and-a-half months old. (Don't ask me what that is in dog years.) She has lived longer with us now than with anyone else, including her mother and siblings. We are likely the only family she remembers.

Things are going very, very well. I don't want to jinx myself by saying it, but I'm pretty sure we've reached the point of "housebroken". You can always expect an occasional accident when they're still young, but she tells us when she needs to go out, and it's been a few weeks since I've had to clean something up. She's a very bright dog -- already knows "sit", "lie down", and "stay", and we're working on "come". She also knows the individual names of most of her toys, which is a little astonishing. (But whether or not she wants to play with the one we tell her to get is another story, of course. Sometimes she'll just look in the direction of Ropey, as if to say, "There it is", and then continue to chomp away on Mousie.)

Her baby teeth are all gone now, I think. The canines are the last to go, and as you can see, we've reached that point. There were a few interesting weeks at the Bark Park, as she was leaving a bloody trail all over the place (mostly on Kita, the Husky mix pup who loves to wrestle as much as Piper does). Once we realized what it was, we had a good chuckle, but seeing Kita with red streaks down her face was a little alarming!

(Now it's Charlie the Standard Poodle's term to scare everybody. He left a little something on Piper's neck the other day. I nonchalantly asked his mom how old he was and nodded knowingly. I'm an old pro now, you see.)

It's been a long time since I've done puppy stuff. I remember when Pepsi lost one of her baby teeth (because until that moment, I didn't know they did!). And I remember housebreaking her, but I don't remember how long it took. And last week I was really wracking my brain because I couldn't remember how old she was when she was spayed (somewhere around six months, I think), or how long it took to recover. Twelve years ago is a very long time, I guess.

The next two weeks are probably going to seem even longer. Piper has grown used to her daily routine which always includes thirty minutes to an hour up at the Bark Park. Since she had her surgery on Friday, that's obviously not going to happen for a bit. In anticipation of this, I took her up there on Thursday night. It was rainy and muddy, but knowing that it would be a while before she saw her buddies again (and there are a lot of them), I couldn't keep her home.

Let's just say that her first stop was the tub when we got home! You see all that grey on her legs and neck? That's a mix of mud and gravel. Hubby said he'd never seen anything quite like it! "We had a black and white dog, and you brought home a two-tone grey dog!"

The operation went well on Friday. I took Hubby's nephew, Jamie, to the hockey game so Hubby could stay home with the patient. She slept all evening and was a little pokey yesterday, but today she seems to be more her old self. Right now she and Daddy are napping (both of them under the covers, of course) and all is right in both their worlds.