Park

Reality check. Pallo is fat. 

Now, he isn't super fat, not yet. But he could stand to lose a few pounds for sure. His endurance (and Koira's, for that matter) isn't all that great right now. So, we need to work on this moving forward.

We went to the park yesterday. I realized while there that we haven't been to this park in a month, which means the dogs haven't had a long off leash walk in that long. Poor pups. 

 I tried to both give them a good workout and not over do anything, since they haven't run this hard in a while. I think they had fun. We saw a few new dogs, like the merle they are greeting above, and a few of our older park friends, like Manny in the next picture. They ran and played and fetched.

There may also have been some barking when the toy didn't get thrown quickly enough.

And my dogs may have been toy hoarders. Poor Manny has short little legs, even shorter than Pallo's. He couldn't get the ball from my guys even with faking them out and giving him a head start in the opposite direction. But I think he liked chasing them with the toy even better than having the toy himself. A good time was had by all.

Before heading home I got out the flirt pole for my guys. We didn't flirt pole for long, since they had already done some serious running playing fetch, but they both love the flirt pole. Koira gets rather loud and demanding with it which is why we can't really play with it at home. I don't want to annoy the neighbors with the shrieking barks she can make.

Overall, I think the dogs had fun. I just need to step up my game. After I got injured at work a year and a half ago, I couldn't really take the dogs to the park much. I couldn't throw a toy far. I couldn't even really take them for walks without hurting a ton just being vertical. It is easy to stay home watching movies or tv or messing around on the computer when you hurt if you leave the house. I tried to keep most of my injury nonsense off the blog, but I'm here to say, it definitely had an affect on my dogs. The habit of taking them to the park every single day, rain or shine, really fell apart then. And I can't beat myself up for the fact that I really couldn't do it. But I'm as much better as I will ever get, and my dogs need this.

So over the next few months I am going to make myself take them out- we have fun once we are out, it is just so easy to procrastinate going out, checking email, checking facebook, reading blogs. Once the habit is lost, it becomes so much harder to get it back. And my dogs need this.