Look Who is 3!!!

Happy Birthday Grace (aka: Gracie, Princess Grace, Duppy, The Dupster, Girl, Pup, etc). One of the main reasons why I wanted to buy Grace was because her birthday was the day before mine so I knew she was special because of that!

I always like to ask GK his Top Five of... basically anything I can think of (courtesy of the movie High Fidelity). You learn a lot when you ask this question and it’s so much fun to hear the answers most of the time too. So in honor of that:

Top Five Reasons why we love Grace this year - in no particular order…

1. When we get home from work she lets out one long howl if we don’t say hi to her right away. This is probably a bad habit but we think it’s funny. She only does it once though. I guess to get it out of her system.

2. She hates the wind and cold as much as we do, which is nice in the winter. She hates the wind so much that if you see us outside with her, you better not blink or you may miss us because she drags us inside so fast it's impressive. She LOVES the snow though and burrows her nose in the snow and runs around making a long line after her. Then when she lifts her nose up it’s covered in snow and her hair is a mess.

3. She has taken to sleeping under our bed now. The only thing is she won’t go under there if we are watching her, she stops and looks at us and waits for us to look away before she army crawls under there. Being the mean parents that we are we usually try to catch her right before she goes under to ask her where she's going, just to piss her off...and to entertain us.

4. When Greg's alarm goes off in the morning she jumps on the bed and usually pounces on him to get up. This is not because she has to go out, it’s really because she wants him to move so she can plop herself down and sleep on his pillow while he gets ready. My favorite part of the moment is usually when he finally does get him up and moving, she lets out a loud sigh and it’s as if she’s thinking “finally, I thought he’d never get up”

5. She LOVES every toy that is given to her. I’ve never seen a dog play with every single toy she has all the time. It’s so weird. The best part is the second you start to act like you might be even thinking about playing with her, she runs off all excited, grabs the first toy she sees and brings it to you. This would be a great trick if in the end she actually GAVE you the toy so you could play fetch with it. Maybe by her 4th birthday she’ll learn how to share!

There are so many more reasons, but I’ll stop there and share some favorite pictures of Grace with all of you!

Grace HATES wearing any form of dog clothing. So of course I think it's funny to put things on her to her a reaction like the below.

This is the first picture we ever got of Grace in her carrier right after we picked her up
Of course Grace went on our first anniversary trip to Galena. How many dogs can say they went to the bathroom on the lawn of The General golf course :)
This is Grace on the beach by my Aunt Nat and Uncle Ron's house in upper Michigan (Lake Superior is behind her).
Grace making a sick GK feel better
She may or may not be close to licking the camera in this one, but I love it still
Grace, Nicole and me relaxing after our (Nicole and I) half marathon this past September.
My cute family!