Science before breakfast

Our dog tends to be heavy on the "faults and annoyances" side of the scales.  I try to remain hopeful that her overall dog quality will increase with time, seeing as how she really is just a puppy in a dog's body.  

For all her downfalls, she does have two redeeming traits:

1 - No matter what the boys do to her, she is accepting of their treatment and has never shown any sign of impatience with them.  Love that.

2 - She's a dog - she barks. But: she (usually) doesn't bark excessively, and is remarkably obedient to our command to "hush!"

Seeing as how she isn't usually a barker, I was especially annoyed when she kept it up outside my bedroom window before my alarm went off this morning.  Greg was already up and she even seemed to be ignoring his occasional, "Trisket! Hush!"

I finally rolled out of bed to look out the window and saw she was barking at the ground.  

So I did the bleary-eyed squint from our bedroom, through the living room where Greg was, through the laundry room for my shoes, and tromped out into the wet cloudy dawn to see what the mutt was barking at.

I went to the spot she had been interested in and found myself further annoyed to be staring at nothing but grass.  

Seriously, dog?  You woke me up barking at grass??

And thennnnn I saw it.

I went from "You are so stupid," to "You're alright, you know it?", to "Good girl!"

Now her find is sitting in my kitchen in a jar.

I can't figure out why she just didn't kill the thing and be done with it.

My favorite part turned out to be Dale, not even out of bed 5 minutes, grabbing our backyard nature book and flipping through to identify our snake.

One of these days we'll learn to listen to that dog when she barks!  For now, at least, I think we'll keep her.