BudBuck

So we are home again after a fantastic Christmas in which Buddy, as is usual, set all the rules. Mark and I went to my parents' cottage for Christmas. Along with my parents, sisters, grandmother and uncle, it was a pretty packed little two-bedroom place! All the sleeping areas at my parents' are in the basement and the main floor houses the kitchen and living areas. Mark and I don't allow Buddy into the bedroom for two reasons - 1) we hope to have kids soon and plan on co-sleeping with baby and so have decided not to let Buddy get used to sleeping in the bedroom and 2) he'd jump all over us and hog the bed and otherwise disrupt our sleep. So at the cottage, my sister's cat goes into the one room that has a door that closes (Simon is notorious for disrupting sleepers) and Buddy stays in the open concept living room. We barricade the stairway with chairs to prevent him from coming down into the basement and bothering people. This has worked very well in the past but not this time.

Buddy busted through the barricade as soon as the lights went out. My sister was the last one to bed and said that he had been lying with his head and paws breaching the barricade and that as soon as she turned out the lights, he slithered like the Grinch right through the chair barrier and was down at our bedroom door in a flash. So I took him back upstairs and added some more chairs to the barrier, criss-crossing them to shore up any holes and weak points. Five minutes later there is a bark and whining at the door of the bedroom. I don't know what kind of doggy gymnastics he was doing up there but at that point I gave up, grabbed my blankets and slept up on the couch in the living room so that he wouldn't spend all night trodding on my poor sisters on his way to our bedroom and keeping everyone up with his pitiful moaning. Oh Buddy!

Anyway, one of my gifts was Photoshop! Woo hoo! I am learning to work the tools and have created BudBuck! You can see it's a little amateur - I didn't take the time to feather out his ruff and blend it naturally into the deer's chest. But I did use fancy tools to erase the deer's ears and replace them with natural background grasses. I also got wicked gifts handmade by my crafty sisters that I will post later. Fun Christmas -yeah!