The dog days

Eventful weekend. On Saturday we took a 4 hour road trip to visit some of my family. Thatcher came along and loved it. He's an angel in the car, besides the dirt and drool he spreads all over the backseat. His favorite position is to squeeze his head onto the armrest between the driver and front passenger seats. He has to be as utterly close to us as possible. When he was younger, he would often climb onto my lap up front. I have no idea why we allowed this, but he was little and cute back then. So occasionally he'll still try to clamber up front, not realizing that he's no longer the 20 lb ball of fur he used to be. It definitely has made people driving next to us do a double-take, when they see this huge black dog squeezed onto my lap and all hunched over in the passenger seat. 

Rainbow on the car ride home

When we arrived at my family's, Thatcher got to run around and play with their two puppies. By run around and play with, I mean he followed them around hopefully while they pretended he didn't exist.  They are a four-month-old brother and sister pair who have never been separated from each other. They literally live in their own little world. They would start wrestling, and Thatcher would gleefully race over to them and try to get in on the action. But they would just ignore him. Poor fellow.

Yesterday we "discovered" an amazing dog park. It's seven acres of woods and trails right along the river. Swimming + tromping through woods + lots of other dogs = Thatcher in heaven. Sometimes I feel bad for him, because he tries to play with other dogs and they don't always want anything to do with this big, goofy giant. He's too slow to have a chance at fetch with the retrievers, too large to play wrestle with the rambunctious dogs, too oblivious to pick up signals when another dog is feeling threatened by him. He still loves it though. A person there was throwing a tennis ball into the river for his lab to fetch. Thatch beat the lab to the ball once, but then the ball disappeared. We were all looking around for it, before we realized that it was hiding in Thatcher's mouth for the last five minutes.