Our dog, Sweetie, is enjoying her first playdate ever, as we are hosting Daisy, our friends’ Portuguese Water Dog for a two-night sleepover. This high-energy pair has played hard all day, and we’re pretty sure they’ll sleep just as hard tonight. Though they look nothing alike, their personalities seem as well matched as their identical collars and pink heart-shaped tags.

While the heat is still with us—and will be for several more months—the dog days of summer are drawing to a close. We started our full homeschooling schedule last week, and this morning, Kellen and Kerrick bid their best canine friend (our puppy, Sweetie) farewell before heading out to the first day back to their once-a-week, school-away-from-home program. As you can see, Kerrick was a little more broken up about it than Kellen was. Regardless of seasons and schedules, we plan to continue the dog days around our house—spending plenty of time taking Sweetie on walks and teaching her tricks, as well as digging deeper into the stack of dog books on our read-aloud list. We just wrapped up Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls (look for a future post on that experience), and next on the list is a little-bit-lighter title: The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog, by John R. Erickson. I’m pretty sure our dog days will last well into winter.

The newest addition to our family is Sweetheart (Sweetie, for short), a 4-month-old blue heeler puppy who unexpectedly wiggled her way into our home—and our hearts—two weeks ago. Kellen and Kerrick had been begging for a puppy for quite awhile, and Shawn and I kept putting them off, saying, “It’s not the right time.” We did have some valid concerns: We wanted Keillor to be well out of babyhood and firmly established as a toddler, and we hoped that Kennah would first overcome her skittishness around dogs. Plus, we wanted our backyard (still a bit torn up after a remodeling project last year) to be a more welcoming environment for a canine companion. But when Sweetie suddenly became available through a friend of my sister’s, we decided to hedge our bets against not-so-perfect timing. (And so far, so good: Keillor and Kennah have taken Sweetie well in stride, and Sweetie has been quite content in our crazy backyard.)

We’ve suffered a few casualties as Sweetie continues to work through the teething stage (shirts, socks, underwear, an Easter egg and part of the piano bench!), but she is otherwise so well-behaved and, well, sweet, that we’ve decided we can live with that one temporary vice. I guess you could say that the entire Hemmings Half Dozen has definitely come down with a classic case of puppy love.