Puppy's First Day

I feel like a mommy blogger who blogs about her kid's first day at school! Except replace "kid" with "puppy" and "school" with "dog park"!

This Saturday we took Cheese to the dog park for the first time. It was not only his first time at the dog park, but it was Antoine's and mine as well! Where I come from we don't have dog parks...it's the country, everything is open fields and grazing cows! And this is Antoine's first real dog, so yeah...the dog park is new territory for us. But we were pretty excited about taking Cheesy. And we were sure that he'd enjoy being off the leash and co-mingling with other dogs.

We're lucky enough to have a free dog park about 15 minutes away from our house. It's a pretty good size and accommodates a lot of dogs and people. There's also three separate fenced in areas, one for small dogs, an area for large dogs and then an additional large dog area that is opened up once the other has been worn down. Now, for the pictures...

On the way to the dog park. He's so happy already and he doesn't even know where we're going!

Are we there yet?

As soon as we got there we immediately ran into another basset hound, almost the same color as Cheese! They became fast friends!

So far, Cheezers is still slightly skittish around the other dogs (I don't blame the guy, everyone else was at least twice his size), but occasionally he has very energetic, confident moments!

What a happy guy!

And then Cheezers found the very muddy swimming pool area (aka, Antoine's and my least favorite part of the dog park)! He proceeded to get entirely disgusting and mud-covered (especially his belly and ears).

But he had fun with the other dogs! Awe, my little guy's getting so big!

And dirty! All his white parts weren't so white anymore!

Cheese post-bath!

One of the nice things about this dog park is it provides a little hosing off area just outside the main fenced in area. Luckily someone was kind enough to let us borrow some shampoo for Cheese, since we had no idea he would get so dirty! Now we know!

Cheese had such a good time at the dog park and was thoroughly exhausted afterward. And we had such a good time taking him that we actually went again on Sunday (where we ran into three other basset hounds)! And we can't wait to take him again!