the sheltiechick blog

Auggie Turns 10

Auggie’s birthday is here, and it’s the big 1-0! We’re in to double digits. I decided to throw him a big party and ask friends to come over (especially since hardly anybody had been over to see my house since I renovated almost the entire thing.)


Birthday boys! Georgie came over for the party, too, but she was not involved in this little family photo. I only have two arms.


Auggie got a nice big pirate cake, with a skull centerpiece and ten candles.


Blow out the candles!


But the cake going into his belly is all he really cares about.


NOM THAT CAKE


NOM ALL OF IT


Even the little crumbies left behind.


Some of them are tiny crumbies and you have to lick them up.


Payton gets cake next.


NOM


Halfway through his nom he realized that was impolite and changed to a slightly less impolite nom.


Then he licked his crumbies too.


Georgie next. I broke her cake into pieces so she wouldn’t simply swallow the entire piece whole, as she tends to do.


A nom nom nom nom.


Nom crumbies too. Who licks??


Next, Auggie got his presents.


Reach in that bag old man, see what you get!


Fishing around…


IT’S A TINY SHEEP IT IS THE BEST TINY SHEEP TOY IN THE WORLD


Mom please throw tiny sheep.


No take, only throw.


Payton says “hey wait, there’s something else in here.”


Oh! There is more.


It’s Swabby Shark! Swabby Shark has been waiting since springtime for Auggie’s birthday. A nice big red pirate shark โ€“ I don’t think there’s many toys that are more quintessential for Auggie.


Please throw Swabby too mom.

Thank you to all my friends for coming to Auggie’s big birthday party. He is my very special guy and having so many people over to pat him and love on him is a great way for him to spend his birthday. Everybody even sang him the Happy Birthday song.
Happiest of happy birthdays, my very best Auggie.

Happy Fall 2015

Ah, fall. Time for cold weather and lots of leaves littering my yard and hours and hours spent mulching and bagging leaves to be hauled away.
And for photos of my dogs looking stunning.


Auggie, the posing pro.


He might be an old man now, but hes still super handsome.


The most wonderful old man dog.


Brothers!


Now serious brothers.


Payton lays down and I asked Auggie to lay down and he said “mmmmmnope.”


He then came to get a cookie from me. Well okay.


Meanwhile, Payton poses.


I will never stop asking for a head down to get cute pictures now that he can do this.


Because its sooooo cute.


A nice sit.


So many years ago when Payton was a baby, I had this cute photo I set up and took. I tried to set it up again andโ€ฆ this happened.


Just kidding, just kidding, we got it.


Big handsome dogs.

Then Payton ran around bark-screaming while I threw leaves at him and then he flopped down and rolled in the leaf pile and I covered him up and he was super adorable.


SUPER adorable.

Halloween 2015 – The Force Awakens

This year was a bit of a challenge to decide on Halloween costumes. Last year was a huge success with the Justice League. I originally wanted to do The Avengers, but in most iterations, there are more Avengers than I have dogs. If last year is any indication, the comic book geek in me has serious problems with not being able to do something RIGHT… so I took a pass on Avengers. But what should we do, then? I kicked around a few ideas, like Peter Pan, featuring Captain Hook and Tic-Toc Croc, but ultimately wasn’t in love with anything.
It was then I realized, when in doubt, you should always go back to your roots.
And use the Force.
I decided almost immediately I wanted to be Han Solo, which meant Payton was my Chewbacca. Georgie was Leia, being the girl. I then had to convince my mom to be Luke Skywalker, which she tried to get out of multiple times, but I presented her with that fact that you simply cannot show up as a Star Wars posse and not have a Luke. I mean, you just can’t.
Certainly we could have cheated and gone to purchase any of the number of costumes out in the mass market, but we all know that’s not how I roll. NOPE. My sewing machine would have been so disappointed in me.

Han and my best buddy Chewie.

It took us a long time to get the footstall trick down. Many times I almost gave up on Payton ever learning it. And now we’re doing footstalls in costumes.


Big bad Chewbacca back home.

This fur was actually a trick to find. I wanted something just right and went to four places to find it. Lots of short fur and light brown but difficult to snag something that looked really Chewbacca-like.

I did purchase a blaster from the Halloween store – it was pretty close to being accurate and way better than anything I could have cobbled together on my own. But it was white and orange from the store, which is just ridiculous. No worries, though – I took care of that little problem with a can of spray paint and some acrylics to help it looked more used-by-a-space-smuggler and realistic.

Georgie might have preferred we went to buy faux hair buns instead of making some for her, but all the ones on the market were pitiful and WAY too small to be movie accurate, so No Thank You. We made the hair buns also.

The hair buns did not survive multiple costume changes, however. Also, she basically hated them… so I didn’t ask her to wear them more than when for the costume contest.

Auggie did not attend with us this year, but if he had, he would have been Yoda. Once we returned home, I looked at what I had in terms of existing costumes.
Turns out Auggie is not Yoda, he is actually Darth Vader.

Typical.