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I don’t know what happened but Mother Nature decided that she hates us. She must have gone on vacation or forgotten her distaste for canada because we have been having a fantastic winter. Then Mother Nature threw minus 50 at us. Seriously! It was fifty degrees below freezing. I have never felt anything so cold in my entire life. We didn’t leave the house for a week. All of the kids’ activities were canceled and many stores in town shut down entirely because they didn’t want to go to work and they knew that no one was out shopping.

When the weather finally broke we were anxious to burn off some energy and no one wanted it more than Daisy. The poor girl didn’t need to be inside so much since her winter coat keeps her plenty warm. We decided to go to one of the dog parks today. I have become somewhat addicted to the dog parks. I love to watch Daisy run around and play with the other dogs and I enjoy talking with dog owners. Everyone is so friendly and easy going as they’re walking along with their pets. I try to go every day or two and on this day we decided to try a new (to us) park. It turned out to be deserted except for two awfully behaving dogs that I didn’t want anywhere near my dog. Thankfully the owner just kept on trucking right past us.

The kids and I had a blast even though we were alone.

Don’t let all that snow fool you. It was great weather. We ended up stripping out of almost all of our winter gear. I always make the kids carry it around though because Alberta weather can change on a dime.

We didn’t quite get the basement finished for Christmas like we had hoped. We did get to move in the week after Christmas though. It’s been so busy though that we haven’t been able to move into the rooms all at once. We’ve been moving in piece by piece. Right now Jason is sleeping on his mattress on the floor until Chuck and I get his bed built.

With a soft mattress on the floor Daisy has taken to sleeping with the boys. Right on top of Jason’s mattress. I think she might be a bit of a blanket hog though. Jason’s not complaining so I’m not going to worry about it. Daisy is going to be pretty sad once we get that bed put back together.

I promise that at some point I’ll stop posting so many picture of our new dog but that time is not now. Right now we’re still in the ‘new toy’ phase. We want to take her everywhere we go, talk about her to everyone we meet and try to get her into our bed. Chuck has reminded us how bad an idea it is to have a 100 pound animal get use to sleeping on the beds so we’ve restrained ourselves a little bit.

One of the things that we read about Newfs is that they’re great with abbies. Gentle giants is what they’re called and I wondered about that this week. Only a day after Daisy came to live with us one of my past doula clients brought her baby over so we could do some Christmas baking. I was sure that Daisy would be better than I expected but I was watching her constantly just to be sure.

These pictures are what she did the entire time. She didn’t want to leave the baby but instead laid right next to her and would occasionally lean over and lick her foot.