Sybil and Timken Help Me Celebrate! Part 1 of 2 Dog Park

Today is my birthday and when Dave asked what I wanted to do of course I said "something with the dogs!". Really 99% of the time that is always my answer so the difference today was we went to a different place than we normally go to walk the dogs during the week. We live where it is not safe to walk dogs in our neighborhood. There is no shoulder and so with 6 dogs in the house who all need to go for walks on a regular basis we always have to hop in the car and go to where we can safely walk. Throw in a dog like Timken who is still working up to walking where there is a lot more going on and we tend to go to the same places over and over. Being this is Monday and a cold and gloomy one at that I thought there would be a good chance that Edmonds, WA would not be too crowded. We had discovered a cool dog park there a few months ago and so we thought we would see how Tim and Sybil did there if it wasn't too busy with dogs.

When we first arrived there were a few dogs and humans there so we left Tim and Sybil in the car and just took our dogs Skip, Jenny, and Liza in at first to check it out and to see how the other dogs behaved before bringing Tim in. The last thing we wanted was for him to get spooked so this was a good plan.

Liza loves to explore anything and everything

Skip waits for dad to get in the park with his ball, Blue.

View of Olympic Mt range from the dog park. Not bad!

Our plan turned out to be a good one. There were a few larger dogs there and one in particular was a younger dog with adolescent dog skills. In other words he practically ran Skip over when he was fetching his ball and also proceeded to viper attack Skip on the back of his neck. I don't blame the dog he didn't know what he was doing wrong, but the owner didn't do anything to stop him. I was all ready to ask the guy to please call his dog off when he started to head to the gate to leave, soon after, the other dogs that were there all left too and we had the entire place to our selves! Perfect for getting Timken and Sybil in the park and not having to worry about them having a bad experience.

In comes Tim. He is a little nervous but curious.

Sybil takes no time at all to start exploring

Tim is kicking up his heels now and starting to get the hang of this!

This park is right on the water, it really is a lovely park.

Sybil shows Tim what sniffing needs to be done.

More sniffing....Sybil loves to experience her world through her nose.

Tim completely forgot himself and got totally into sniffing to see who had been there and what story they left behind.

There are a couple of cool red fire hydrants planted in the park, lots of info going on there!

I love this picture of Tim. So wide eyed and curious. We just lucked out that we could be there with no other dogs for his sake. He really was able to feel confident and free in a new place.

Calling the dogs to head back to the car, Sybil comes running....

Tim comes running....

Please stay tuned for part 2. Timken and Sybil meet something scary and with some time and patience we had another success! What could be a better birthday than this? Oh and the lunch and cocktail we had after was pretty great too. Thank you Dave (and dogs) for making it such a wonderful day :)