The Life of a Puggle

What is a puggle you may ask? Only the cutest darn dogs you ever did see! A puggle is a cross between a pug and a beagle. We have two and they are integral members of the family.

Minnie is our oldest and we adopted her when we were living in Utah, she is almost 5 years old. Funny side note, the family we got her from was right down the street from where my dad grew up in Providence.

Buddy came to us while living here in Arizona. We were wanting another female when adding a second dog, but after driving all the way to North Phoenix (about an hour from home, at least) we found out they only had males left. Apparently the kid who was sent to check the puppies genders when we called to ask didn't know the difference between males and females. We love him just the same (or even more) than we would have loved another female dog. Buddy and I share the same birthday! He is a little over 3 years old.

Who could resist this cute face?

Each of our dogs have distinct and opposite personalities. Minnie is quite the contradiction. She is sweet, but she will put Buddy in his place. She is the alpha dog. She is independent and likes her own space, but loves to cling to us (on her terms, especially when Buddy is getting attention). Minnie is smart, but very stubborn. She is a little high strung and likes to watch tv to bark at any animal on screen. She protects the family from any audible threat and knows when to cuddle and comfort us when we need it. A puggle kiss really helps when you are having a hard day. She can be a bully to Buddy when he gets in her way, but when they play she loves to roll on her back while they wrestle and then chase each other around the house. 

Buddy and I cuddle while he naps.

Buddy is a sweet boy. On the surface Buddy may not be the smartest dog, but that is not the case. While Minnie does tricks, Buddy could really case less. When something is important to him he focuses on it, usually that is food, treats, toys, or "journeys" (we don't dare say W a l k around them) He knows when it is food time and does he will spin in circles with excitement when we're headed into the kitchen, then he will paw at the food container as if to say "here's the food, this is it, I'm hungry!" Buddy loves people. When people come over he will howl with excitement which may come across as 

aggressive, but really he just wants to meet you and be your friend. He is our puggle shadow and will follow us around the house. We call him our "Most Loyal Buddy"

The dogs really live a rough life

Chuck's Green Thumb*

Around the house we have spent the last couple of weeks doing a little yard work here and there. We've been killing weeds, pulling up dead plants, and even planting some seeds and plants. We've also had to work on our drip system a little bit too (now you know why we had dead plants). Our sweet little puggles like to chew off the heads on the drip line and we had quite a few geysers shooting all over the place. Rather than fix them right away, I turned off the drip system and a lot of our plants started dying. Well we finally got around replace the drip line heads and also plugged up any line where bushes no longer existed.

Our Dahlia Seedlings

If you know a little about Chuck, you'll know he spent most of his childhood living up in the mountains of California. He didn't grow up with a yard that had a lawn or had many plants to take care of. His yards were mostly pine needles. When we moved into our house 4 years ago, it was his first time ever using a lawn mower and he took ownership of it. ( I made the mistake of mowing the lawn one day and he wasn't very happy that I stole his job)

This is what they should look like

So a couple of weeks ago we decided to replant the planters in our front yard. We decided to go with seeds of dahlias, forget me nots, poppies and I don't remember the forth one. It seemed like it was taking forever for them to sprout and in our impatience we decided to plant some actual plants.

As it came time to plant our flowers, Chuck turns to me and asks me how to do it. I chuckled a bit and remembered he has literally never done this before. I showed him how and to our dismay as we dug up the dirt, little seedlings had been growing and they just hadn't broken through the dirt yet.

Gazania, our full grown plants

We decided to check our other planters to see if there were any signs of life and to our surprise the other three planters all had green sprouts peeking through the soil. Hurray! Now we just need to keep them alive!






*Not to be confused with Chuck Green's thumb (who is Chuck's uncle and namesake)