Dog Days of Summer

The last few days have been full of DOGS!  This past weekend my "Sioux Falls family" went to Minneapolis and I watched the dogs while they were gone. 

For those of you who don't know, my Sioux Falls family consists of my friends (who are sisters) Brittney and Amber and their families, their parents - Dan and Diane, and also their brother Jerod (who lives in Minneapolis with his family) and their grandpa Ken.  They've accepted me as part of their family and I love them all. 

Any who, back to the dog sitting.  Amber and her family have a yellow lab, Zoey.  Dan and Diane have two dogs, Skosh and Quinn. 

*This is Skosh - she's the oldest one of the group and just barks as the three labs play.

*Zoey is in the back and Quinn is lying in the front.  Quinn is just around a year old and Zoey is about 2 years old.

So when I watch all the dogs I stay and Dan and Diane's house and have all 4 crazy dogs (including Neko) running all over the place.  By Sunday afternoon here's what all four dogs were doing.

(Zoey has crazy eyes in the background, but as you can see everyone was tuckered out.)

Neko was tuckered out and slept all day Monday to rest up from the weekend and for her big outing today!

So, what did she do today, you may be asking yourself?  Well she got to go SWIMMING today at the swimming pool!!

On the last day of certain swimming pools being open in Sioux Falls, the pools have "Dog Nite" where all dogs are allowed to come and go swimming for a couple hours.  This was Neko's first trip, but will definitely be an annual occurance!  Well Neko was slightly overwhelmed when we got there as there were TONS of dogs and people in attendance.  Here is a pic of the pool after it had cleared out some:

Neko stayed close to me until she saw the pool and off she ran and jumped right in - excpet she didn't realize it was the 5 FT end.  She couldn't figure out why she couldn't touch bottom and was floundering around.  Luckily I was able to fish her out and she figured out that she had to actually swim instead of just wading in like she does at the stock ponds at my parent's farm. 

Well over the next hour and a half we worked on jumping into the pool like the labs in contests on TV and I worked on getting a good picture of her and this is the best one we got (which I think is pretty good myself!).

Let me tell you - it was not easy to time hitting the button on my camera at the same time as flinging her ball so she would lunge off the edge of the pool!!  I have quite a few misses - like this one.

Next year I'm going to make sure to bring a change of clothes since I ended up as wet as Neko.  I had to help pull her out of the pool every time since she would swim to the edge of the pool and then try to climb out.  All around we had a "swimming" good time!! :)