Tara's theme for this week is friendship, so I thought I'd pay a little homage to someone in this household that gets sorely overlooked by this blog. Or if she is mentioned it is only in picnic stealing, fox poo rolling, bloody dog context. But Jessie is a terrific friend. She is a people dog, ever so friendly and adores everyone, which does mean that she is never going to make a guard dog of any kind. She's our constant companion, particularly if you are cooking in the kitchen. Of all of us, she enjoyed Bosnia the most. She roamed around our garden making friends with passer-bys. The Bosnians adored her, quite a few used to route their evenings strolls past our house in order to come and say hello, even more would pop into the local bakers on the way and buy her a fresh loaf of bread. It wasn't really a surprise that despite our best efforts at keeping her weight down she put on 10kilos in the time we were there.
But best of all she can be trusted implicitly with children. She submits with good grace to being used as a horse, dutifully hauls small boys along on their scooters, endures being at the bottom of a wrestling bundle of small children and then just seems delighted at being a part of the pack. When Luke stuck his finger in her eye socket, meriting a good snap if ever anything did, she just looked at us and whimpered slightly as if to say 'um this is just a little bit much'.
So these pictures are of the friendship between the boys and their dog. After all, the small child that wants to throw sticks and the dog that wants to chase them is a match made in heaven.
Then just to show how we choose to repay this devoted friendship. Have a look at the amount of space she had in the car on our 3 day drive back from Bosnia in April. There is nothing like the faithfulness of a dog. No human would have ever forgiven us.
UPDATE: She must have known I was being nice about her. Or at least decided to get revenge for the three day cramped journey conditions. She's just come back from a walk, having eaten some form of poo and rolled in something else. She's a tasty shade of green and smells unbelievable. Even a dunking in the river can't disguise the fact that she is covered in poo. I'm feeling myself heading back to the 'bloody dog' frame of mind... ..