It’s the off-season. As in, not wedding season. (Typically considered to be April-October) For a wedding photographer Winter is the best time to start learning new techniques, try out new gear, and start planning for the year ahead. Late Winter and Early Spring are hard for me. I start to get anxious and excited to get back to work. I’m well rested, but because wedding season hasn’t kicked off yet and it’s too chilly and muddy for folks to want family photos… I’m bored! That means I have a lot of time to dote over my dogs and try all my photography tricks on them. If you follow my Instagram feed, you know that I’m the consummate dog mom. It occurred to me this week that I haven’t blogged about my dogs in over a year. My dog Lucy died of cancer in October of 2014, and Cody died of cancer in February of 2015. We grieved painfully and continue to hurt over the loss of those two dogs. But the only way we saw to recover was to fill our home with panting and wagging again. Since then David and I have acquired two new dogs and I’ve completely missed the opportunity to share their adorable faces with my blog readers. How neglectful of me!

Today I’d like to introduce you to my children. (If that phrase made you roll your eyes, you’re excused. You don’t need to keep reading this post. Come back another day! It’s totally cool.)

Millie was born in October of 2014 and is a Chocolate Lab. We bought her from a friend who decided to give breeding a try, because she has a wonderful lab named Piper and she thought (wisely) that Piper’s genes should be carried on. Millie was one of two girl pups in a litter of six labs. Piper is a yellow lab, and the sire is chocolate, and somehow all of the puppies turned out to be chocolates! Millie is a REALLY good dog. She’s a typical lab puppy… so she’s freakishly strong, whip smart, and needs a LOT of stimulation and exercise. When she was a puppy she loved to steal and chew socks, but other than that she hasn’t really chewed on anything that she wasn’t given as a toy. (Knock on wood…)

This is the first photo we ever saw of Millie. I’m not sure which one she is. I know she was smaller than most of her brothers. I think either the one on the far left or the 2nd from the right. I just know she’s the cute one. 

Remy is a hot mess. I mean that in the nicest way. Remy was abandoned in a field as a very small puppy. He was forced to fend for himself for at least 3 months. We think he was approximately 4-5 months old when he was abandoned and he was 8-9 months when he was rescued by a kind neighbor who saw him in the fields alone and lured him in with food. We saw a photo of him posted on Facebook by One Dog at a Time Rescue and I knew right away that he needed us. He came to us frightened, underweight, and in desperate need of love and attention. Since then he has gained so much confidence, but he continues to need affection and reassurance. His favorite place to be is in the lap of one of his humans. Millie would love to place fetch and wrestle and tug of war all the live-long day. By contrast, Remy would much rather stretch on your lap and have you scratch his belly than just about anything in the world… but wrestling with Millie and barking at pedestrians are both pretty fun for him as well. Remy is NOT a fan of visitors. Hate is a strong word, but I think it’s safe to say he hates strangers. As a result, we hardly ever have visitors to our home anymore. That’s fine for us since we like to be introverted homebodies, but occasionally we feel a bit rude. The answer to “our house or yours?” is going to be a resounding “yours” for a while.

This is the first photo we ever saw of Remy. It was posted on the ODTR Facebook page and I just needed that cute little face in my life. We fostered to adopt, because ODTR doesn’t allow adoption until after sterilization. We’re technically considered a “foster failure”, but come on… we never intended to be fosters. We wanted to be owners. 

Our dogs are best friends. That’s what you always hope for when you get two dogs. We believe that, as pack animals, dogs do better in pairs. When we are away from home, we want them to have each other. We prefer our pairs to be a male/female pair about the same age and that’s worked out really well for us.

Millie came to us in November of 2014 and was with Cody until February of 2015. She and Cody were a really great pair. We feel like Cody showed her the ropes around the Grant household. We noticed that Millie was much more naughty and restless after Cody passed and four months later we decided to see about getting her a buddy. Remy joined our family in June of 2015 and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Millie and Remy love to race, wrestle, chew raw hides, play in the snow, bark at the neighbor’s morbidly obese dachshund, and sometimes you can even find them snuggled up with one resting his or her head on the other while they nap together.

This photo of them chewing rawhides together is pretty crummy, because of the awful dull tungsten lighting… but, you gotta shoot moments like this while they last. I didn’t know if I’d have time to grab my lights and adjust the room to look best. So, photography lesson for the day: it’s better to capture a moment you want to remember while you can. Even if it’s not perfect.
I LOVE how they’re laying side by side. Best buds!

In short, my dogs are the best. They’re cute, sweet, always THRILLED to see me. They’re heartbroken when we leave them. They live for our attention. What could be better than that? Until Wedding season kicks off again, I’m more than happy to practice on them with my new lighting gear.