Peanut Butter Pumpkin Dog Cookies Version 1

I got some new silicone paw shaped cookie/ice cube trays. I picked a simple recipe from this blog because I had all these ingredients on hand. There is a better version of this recipe here that uses flax seed in place of eggs so the cookies will have a longer shelf life. I plan on trying these ones in the near future.

But for tonight, I made the the cookies as follows:

• 1 Cup Canned Pumpkin (not pie mix)
• 1.5 Cups Peanut Butter
• 2 Cups Wheat Flour
• 2 Eggs

1. Preheat oven at 350 degrees (try 275 and bake longer if you want a crisper cookie)
2. Mix above ingredients - should be a play dough like consistency
3. Roll into balls and flatten with fork, or do what I did and place the dough in your fancy new silicone puppy paw cookie sheet.
4. Bake for 20-30 minutes, cool on wire rack, and serve to drooling dogs

Here are the girls, guarding the cooling cookies from evil cookie thieves

My shiny new silicone puppy paw baking dishes

An army of puppy cookies

Torture

Damn Grass Seed

The girls were having fun playing fetch in the yard Thursday night. When we came in I noticed she was rubbing her eye. Turns out she had a grass seed embedded in the inside of her lower eye lid. Had to be pulled out with tweezers. Ouch.

The next morning her eye was still weepy and I saw her rub her eye which lead to a visit to the vet.

The green dye in her eye represents her corneal ulcer secondary to that damn grass seed

And now she has to wear a cone for a week :(

She isn't letting the cone get in the way of her ball obsession

So for now, she's on pain medication and eye drops (antibiotics). The cone is to prevent more eye rubs which hinders the healing process. Poor baby.

However, she isn't letting it get in the way of her flyball career!

Happy Birthday, Violet! She turned TWO!

My girls are so tolerant. Here is photographic proof.

And, of course, a short video

Violet got a big girl collar

Yesterday Violet turned two years old! Happy birthday, baby girl! We bought her a "big girl" collar. We don't make them wear collars often, mostly out in public, so it'll be for special outings and such. It'll have their tags and other identifiers on it.

We had a custom carved collar made from Paco Collars. Turned out very nice.

The specs (for those interested)
Hand carved leather by Anna Poe with Paco Collars.
1.5" at the widest point (where the 'princess bitch' tag is) and tapers down to 1" - the leather backing is thinner than normal to keep it light weight for Violet
Brass hardware
Tag is from Fetching Tags, also brass
Two pink rhinestones  - for bling ;)

Front Porch Update

I am on a dog forum and someone recently had their dog accidentally slip out their front door and attack a leashed dog who was being walked in front of the house. That landed the dog and owner in hot legal trouble. Now their dog is labeled "dangerous", has to walk with a muzzle on, etc. All sorts of legal hoops for them to jump though.

Shortly after reading that, we had company over and they accidentally let both girls slip out the front door. They ran into the neighbors back yard. It was fine - dogs were collected and no harm no foul. BUT the neighbors own dogs and they easily could have been out. It would have been bad. So very very bad.

So that let to some upgrades! We hired someone to make our front porch look pretty but also functional - keeps that naughty Violet of ours behind bars!

Before

After

Why don't you love us, mommy?!

WHY ARE WE IN PRISON!!?

The front gate is pretty slick. It has the main door that will get used every day but it also opens ALL the way in case you ever need to bring in something big like furniture.

This gate auto-closes after you. So even if my visitors are forgetful, the gate will do the job for them.

The usual entry (propped open by my gorgeous chewed up tennis shoe)

Here it is opened up all the way. Sort of. The gates open all the way up flush with the walls they hinge on but I'd need something to keep them there.

The view from the inside. Baby gates to keep them from bolting out the front door but if that fails (like it did in my opening paragraph of this blog post), the front porch should hopefully catch them. That's the goal anyway!

Now we just need to paint the gate white and it'll be done.

Also on the list of fixes is adjusting ALL the gates on our property to auto-close. With every gate we have that closes behind you, we lessen our chances of an accidental puppy escape. So besides the front porch gates, there are a total of 4 other gates on our property that are getting fitted with auto-closing mechanisms.