February 20th is Love Your Pet Day! Lucky for me, I have 295 pounds to love.

Life has been a little dull lately. Dad’s been commuting to Boston a lot lately, so he’s leaving the house before 0700 and not getting home until well after 1900. Mom only has to go to the office once a week, but her job has been a really crazy, so she’s on the phone or Skype almost all day.

With both of them so busy, I’ve had to find things to keep myself occupied during the day. I have lots of toys, but a puppy needs new, interesting objects to keep him entertained.

Today, I had a real treat. Mom forgot to put the toilet paper on the high shelf in the bathroom again. And lucky for me, it was a full roll so I was busy shredding for at least a couple of hours.

Look, Mom... textile arts!

Shredding toilet paper is very hard work.

Hah! I hid my squeaky soccer ball upstairs in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I’m really good at hiding things. Mom knows its up there ’cause she saw me with it, but even she couldn’t find it.

And it doesn’t matter if Dakota sees this ’cause he’s not allowed to go upstairs yet — we’d never get a wink of sleep at night.

So Mom’s always bragging about Kisa ’cause she apparently fetches reliably and everyone knows that Leonbergers don’t fetch. Truth of the matter is that Kisa only fetches her favorite squeaky soccer ball. I couldn’t figure out how come I had all these toys to play with from the minute I got here. Turns out it was all the toys that Kisa wouldn’t play with.

Mom says she bought all sorts of toys trying to get Kisa to play and she wouldn’t have any part of it until Grandma Bell showed up on Christmas with the famous soccer ball. Mom was afraid Kisa would get jealous if she gave me the soccer ball so she waited until I had lived here a while before she brought that one out. Boy, did Kisa perk up. Mom says she hasn’t played with that ball for five years, but she was fetching better than a retriever and as fast as I am, I never got to put a paw on it.

I’ll probably never get another chance because the soccer ball has mysteriously disappeared. I wonder where it went?

Before I knew what was happening, I let Dakota get under my skin and now I’m really starting to like the little guy.  What a tough Leonberger I turned out to be.  I guess getting older has turned me into one big softy. It has been a long time since I’ve played with Larkin, but yesterday I was rough-housing with Larkin and Dakota and I actually had fun. Wore me out they did, but I slept really well last night so I suppose the exercise did me some good. Dakota might help me take an inch or two off my belly which is a little rounder than it used to be.