We had a meeting with P's teacher and we're very pleased to report that he's doing much better. Now he's doing most of his homework and as he's actually revising for the exams, he's doing much better on the test. He also participated playing the piano for the whole school in the Santa Cecilia's concert and performed in a little play. However the teacher also reported that he sometimes forgets to bring the equipment for PE, that his hand witting is atrocious, that he's spelling in Catalan needs to improve and that he's still very shy and not play much with the other kids.
So, apart for the shyness, which I don't know what can I do (any suggestions are very welcome), I think that we did the right thing in taking away all the things that P enjoys at home (computer, Nintendo, Gameboy, TV time plus allowance.) and only given him some time to use them after he's done his homework and done some extra work. So now that he's back on track we're relaxing the rules a bit and we even started giving him some allowance as well and promised him an increase if (and when) he get better results at school.
We also gave a lot of though to the plan of getting a new dog. "The husband", ever the scientist, did a thorough research on every imaginable breed of dogs and their characteristic
s plus what we can realistic offer to it. So, after a while he found the Shiba Inu, a Japanese dog that's one of the oldest breeds in the world. I've never heard of them and thought that it was very unlikely that we were to find a Japanese breed here, but "the husband" was so taken with them that he managed to find a place where they breed them at just an hour from home. (for their web site click here).So we contact them and went to visit their place on a very sunny Sunday. To start with they live in a such a small village that it's not even listed in the GPS so it took us forever to find the nearby village on the map that they send us, then we had to ask for directions to Alta-riba and after some driving we managed to get lost and arrived to a tiny village. It's such a small place that houses don't even have addresses and as it was siesta time (after lunch time where everybody goes to take a nap specially on Sunday) we just parked there and tried to phone them.
After 5 minutes a car
arrived and as we approached them to ask for direction they told us they we just parked in front of their house and they were the dog's owners. As we arrived at the place by chance this is the closest thing to fate that I've ever seen.They are a lovely young couple with two small children and theirs is not one of those awful dog factory but a house in the country where they have dogs that they obviously love. So, if you want to buy one dog from them you have to wait until one litter is produced, no fixed time, and they will give you the puppy only when it's ready to go, with all the papers, vaccines, etc. This may take time as their heat period is around spring time. They have 6 Shiba Inus and one rescued dog. I appreciated this as it shows that they do love dogs in general and are not dog snobs (in case there's such a thing!).
Of course the dogs were adorable and we all fell in love with them. The picture here is one of their dogs. They were smaller than I thought they'll be, more or less lighter that an adult Beagle. They've got more fur that I expected and we've been told that they shed it twice a year so they do require regular brushing and I can just imagine dog hair everywhere in our sofa! They're famous for being very clean, even fastidiously so, and very clever dogs, the owners said that they temperament is that of a big dog in a small body: calm and assertive.
Of course I do believe that we'd fallen in love with almost any dog and I'm not sure about the morality of spending a lot of money on a puppy, but "the husband" heart was set on the Shiba and this was his turn to choose (I did choose Darwin). So, after playing with dogs for a while and asking a lot of questions we decided that yes, we want one. I wanted a girl-dog, to even things out a bis at home, but "the husba
nd" said that he always had boys and that he really, really wanted one and that it was, after all, his turn to choose. So, a boy it'll be.We pay the first instalment (€250), meaning that we'll be the first to choose a male from the litter in summer. Then we pay a second instalment when the puppies are born and a final payment when we collect him.
We're looking forward to that.
I still miss my sweet and cheeky Darwin everyday. This is the last picture of us together. Nobody will ever replace him, but we do need some extra love in our life and a reason to get out and walk more.
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