Animal Insting

On Tuesday, Mom raked leaves the whole afternoon, and I am happy to report that she finally finished raking the whole yard!  There were more leaves than usual this year because of all the rain we got this summer.  Most years, Mom fills up about 45 of those big brown paper bags with leaves, but this year she filled up 63 bags!  This is a new world record for our house, and we are all very proud of Mom.

Anyway, it was a really nice day on Tuesday, so we dogs all went out in the yard and helped Mom with the Big Raking Project.  There's a lot of stuff to do when you're raking, so it's a good thing Mom had us around to help out.

First of all, you have to have the right kind of bags, so Barry and I checked out the bags to make sure they were okay.


Then you have to rake the leaves into piles.  I supervised this part of the project.

If you get bored, you might go looking for something else that's interesting to do.  We were lucky that Mel discovered some kind of yummy-smelling critters in the woodpile.  Mom said they were probably chipmunks because sometimes chipmunks come and live in our woodpile.  They used to live in the space under our sun room, but then Uncle Mike fixed it so they couldn't get in there, which was kind of sad because we liked to try to catch them.  And a couple of times we really did catch them.

Anyway, we all tried to get at the chipmunks for a while, including Gabe, although Mom did not get any pictures of him doing this.  But sadly, we could not reach any of the chipmunks, so we gave up on that activity.  Then Gabe went in the house and took a nap, and after a while, I went in and took a nap, too.

Mel stayed outside and took a nap there.  He's more of an outdoor-type guy than the rest of us dogs.  Barry doesn't care much for the outdoors, unless Mom is there, so he stayed outside with her the whole time.  He helped by checking for fresh, edible poop in the leaf piles and also by counting all the bags after they were full.

So anyway, that's the whole story of how we helped Mom rake leaves.  It's really a good thing that we got finished raking on Tuesday because yesterday the weather turned really cold and windy, and it would not have been a good day for raking.

I'm afraid it's going to stay cold and icky for quite a while now, like, maybe until spring.  Winter is not my favorite season because winter makes me cold.  Brrrr!  I think I will go find a nice blankie to curl up in now!