A Day at the Dog Park.

In an attempt to garner more dog friends for Sullivan, Hubs and I have done several things. Even before Sullivan could navigate stairs (yes, we had to teach him how to climb both up and down stairs and it took DAYS) we brought him home to meet the family dog, Hurley. As you know, Hurley is a 20lb Jack Russel/Pug mix who think he's king of the world. He's three years old and crotchety. Needless to say, those two never hit it off. If you even mention the word, "Sullivan" around Hurley, he starts whining and heads for the hills.

Next, we threw Sullivan in the car and drove two hours to family in Maryland to let Sullivan play with "the big dogs," Tucker and Rudy. Tucker and Rudy are labradors and they are ginormous. No, really. It's kind of like Tucker was fed some sort of growth factor at birth. His Mom and Dad refer to him as, "a Grande Lab." I'll dig around to see if I could find any pictures, although I don't think they will do him any justice. Anyway, the "boys" hit it off marvelously until Tucker wanted to do nothing more than hump our clueless 6 month old sheepdog. Moving on..

In the meantine, whenever we would meet fellow neighborhood dogs, all would go swimmingly for the first 30 seconds, the sniffing, the tail wagging, until suddenly, the other dog's demeanor would instantly change as they would lunge for Sullivan's jugular. Poor Sheepie, the guy who wouldn't hurt a fly!

At exactly 1 year old, we knew it was time for the "Great Snip" and we brought Sullivan in for his operation. We thought that perhaps he was somehow emitting some dominance tactic over every dog that he met and hoped that this might cure it. It's been one month since his surgery and although we haven't noticed a difference, we were hoping that other dogs would.

Cue our Saturday at the dog park. We. did. fabulously.

Sullivan LOVED the dog park. He met SO many new friends and spent the entire two hours running laps around the large field. He chased frisbees with a couple of labs, played tug with a pug, rolled around in the mud with a collie, and had a wonderful time herding the other dogs at the park. We couldn't be prouder dog parents.

All around us we heard, "Who brought the Olde English?" "Look how nicely he plays with that little dachsund puppy!" "What a beautiful dog!" Okay, okay. So we might have been beaming with pride.

Which is much better than what Hubs said to me when we first pulled up to the park, "This could either go really good? Or really badly."

Day one at the dog park? Huge success.