Toto
Toto is seven, a Great Pyrenees, and somehow both the sweetest dog I've ever met and completely hardheaded at the same time. Those two things shouldn't coexist as easily as they do in him.
He's alert and protective, just like his father was — but it never tips into anything unfriendly. He loves kids especially, and his patience with them is something I've genuinely never seen fail. Small kids who don't know how to pet a dog yet grab at him wrong, poke him, climb on him a little — and he just stands still and lets it happen. I have never once seen him get irritated by it.
He doesn't bark unless something's actually wrong. That's the part that matters most, practically — when Toto barks at home, I go look, because it means something. No noise for no reason, ever.
He loves sleeping outside. He loves the dog park every single day. He loves people, full stop — which, if you've read the last two posts, tells you exactly why he's there every time something happens.
Chuppa
Chuppa is three, a Chihuahua, originally from Kansas City. He came to me at eleven months old shy and timid in a way that's hard to describe unless you saw it — he hid. Under the table, under the bed, behind the couch, wherever he could disappear to. He only came out for meals. The rest of the day, he watched from somewhere I couldn't see him.
At the breeder, his name was Spiderman. It fit, for a minute — he was small and he was always hiding, so I get the logic. But it stopped making sense pretty fast. There's nothing Spiderman about a dog who's this confident, this cute, and this constantly underfoot. So the name changed to Chuppa, and it's stuck ever since.
Two years later, he's a completely different animal. Confident everywhere he goes. He's with me constantly — at home, he's always positioned where he can see me, and if he loses track of me for even a minute, he comes looking until he finds me.
He walks on a leash, technically, but in practice he might as well be off it. Somewhere around 85% of the time, he's just walking alongside me like he chose to be there, which he did. The other 15% is him stopping to investigate something I'll never understand the appeal of.
He loves meals, sleep, and Achii.
Achii
No photo yet — he's not big on sitting still, and honestly I still haven't fully figured him out. Profile coming once I catch him in a moment that isn't a blur.