Some pictures of Bella at 6 months of age. We went down to the river tonight to eat our dinner and had Bella along enjoying the evening with us. The color, brightness and general quality of the photos is a bit off because I took these pics on my iPhone.
Unfortunately, she now has a scarred nose. I'm not sure how it happened, but I think it may have been a self-inflicted injury caused by her dew claws scratching her mosquito-bitten face.
Finishing Earl's Italian soda (strawberry-flavored ice was all that was left in the cup). The cup eventually met it's doom when she ran out of ice and patience.
The chickens are always a source of entertainment (and frustration) for Bella. Right before I took this picture I caught her trying to dig her way under the pen.
After much trial and tribulation, we finally managed to get Bella's "smile" caught on camera. It was unbelievably difficult due to the fact that the smile only flashes across her lips for a fraction of a second. Needless to say, I got plenty of throw-away shots that were taken at just the wrong instant. Some of them are shown below, sort of a progression toward the full smile.
Out of focus, but so funny. It reminds me of a "Far Side" cartoon with two dogs sitting together with one asking the other, "I don't know. Rex, can you make an O with your lips?"
Well, I tried to snap a pic of Bella doing her smile thing. Of course, when I first got home I asked her to "smile" and she immediately "grinned," showing her teeth. So, I went and got the camera and tried to get it immortalized on film. The best I could get was one of her looking sort of like an alligator (and again, out of focus).
Here's the latest Bella update. She did quite well in puppy class tonight -- much better than last week. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that there were two dogs missing, so we had only 4 dogs there instead of 6. Whatever the reason, I was thankful for a somewhat calmer Bella at the end of my leash.
We've been working on a variety of different tricks with Bella. She's so smart that she catches on almost immediately to everything. And now that we have a small collection of tricks, we can ask her to do them "rapid-fire" and she loves it. She now knows how to "talk" (a quiet, low, grumbly doggie talk; e.g., "roo, roo"), "roll over" (she learned that one today), "sneak," "pounce," "smile" (see the picture below), "dance," and a version of "shake." I think that's it.
Getting ready to bother one of the cats . . .
She loves yogurt! She always gets to lick out my dish when I'm finished. Tonight I polished off the last of the tub and she got to clean it out. I tried to get a picture of her yogurt-covered face, but it didn't turn out.
Pretty pose
This was me trying to catch Bella doing the "smile" trick. Her lips were either on the way down or the way up, I'm not sure; but I didn't catch it at the right moment, and she just looks goofy.
