This morning I decided to try a little experiment and I left all the doors open upstairs - three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Normally, when I have left any door open, Rocky goes in and sees what there is to grab and run with triumphantly. This time, I tried to puppy-proof the rooms a little better, especially by putting the laundry basket in our room up on the little love seat.

So I am downstairs and I’ve had breakfast and coffee and I’m sitting at the computer reading blogs and things. Rocky chews his bone down here for a while and goes to look out the patio door - his usual routine. Then he decides to go upstairs. This is also routine and when he has sniffed at all the closed doors, he comes back down again. Because I have left the doors open, I listen and at one point, I hear something going on in the guest room and go upstairs to find him with his whole head under the bed, sniffing at the things I have stored under there. I coax him out and he comes back downstairs.

Later he goes back up. This time, I notice after a while that things are really quiet in the house and Rocky has not come downstairs. I figure that if he is quiet, he is probably not chewing on something, but then I wonder - what IS he doing? I sneak upstairs and look in the sewing room - no dog, the guest room - no dog, the bathroom - no dog and finally at the other end of the hallway, I come to our bedroom and find... Rocky on the love seat! He is curled up on the half not occupied by the laundry basket, looking for all the world exactly as though he belonged there.

Now this is where we allowed Uma to sleep for several years. When she got older, Peter thought her old bones should have a comfortable place to sleep at night and that became her bed. So the love seat must fairly reek of dog to another dog and I guess Rocky figured it was a suitable place for him to take a nap. I don’t blame him and he did look very cute up there. And when I asked him to get “off”, he did with no hard feelings at all.

I didn’t take a picture because I didn’t have the camera on me and I didn’t want hard evidence around that we had allowed Rocky on the furniture, even though I didn’t strictly speaking “allow” him, as he went up of his own accord.