Where I Talk About the Games I Love

There are a lot of games and stuff I like to play when I am not playing ball outside. But truthfully, I have to say that most of my inside games involve balls, too. I like it when Mom tosses me a ball, I catch it, and throw it back to her with my mouth. Sometimes, we play speedball where Mom gathers up a bunch of my balls, asks if I am ready, and pitches them to me one after another,  real fast. I usually get bonked on the head during this game because I forget what we are doing and pause to chew on one of my favorites. When we play soccer, Mom rolls the ball to me and I act like a goalie and use my feet to stop it from getting past me. We also play this same game with Mom using my toy hamburger like a hockey puck. She does a victory dance if she succeeds and I squeak the toy if I win.

Mom is teaching me a new game right now. She makes me sit at one end of the hall, puts a ball in the middle, and then she goes to the other end. She will hold up one finger and say “Ready” and then “Set” and after about 22 hours, she will finally say “Go.” Then I race to get the ball before she does. (Sshh!  It really is not much of a race, I could beat her on one leg.) The problem with this game is that I get so excited, I forget to wait for “Go” and then Mom calls me a cheaterbutt and makes me go back to the beginning. But, at least this is one time I don’t hear the dreaded “No running in the house” rule.  

We also play “Find” where Mom hides my ball around the house and I have to find it. A cousin of this is when she scatters a few treats around the house and I use my nose like a vacuum cleaner to locate and eat them. Other times, Mom lies in bed and hides my ball underneath the covers.  She really likes this game, I am not sure why. Sometimes, she tries to hide from me, herself, but she can never get far enough away to hide very well, I always find her in one minute.

Mom likes to torture me by putting my ball underneath an upside down laundry basket or in my toy rubber cage and I have to figure out how to get it out. I think this game should be banned along with the stupid game where she puts toys in the middle of the floor, says a name, and I have to go pick out which one she says.

I like agility and swimming and tetherball and singing with Mom, but I will tell those stories another time. But I do have to say that I learned how to play with Kong  last week. Kong is a fat red rubber thing with a hole in his belly. Mom puts little cookies down inside Kong and I have to beat him up and throw him around to make the cookies come out. I think this game is very instwukshunal.  That means it teaches me many things and we should play it at least ten times a day.

Where I Talk About Playing Ball

One of my most favorite things to do in the world is to play ball. Believe it or not, I am not sure Mom ever played ball before I came, but I have taught her how to play, and now I believe she loves it, too! Oh sure, she jokes with me sometimes about it. When I beg her to come out and play in the yard and its 98 degrees and the skitas are biting or when there’s snow on the ground and the wind is so cold it freezes your patooties off, she’ll tell me I’m crazy if I think for one minute she's going to come outside and play. But she does come out, more often than not, even when it’s dark outside and she stumbles around the yard because she can't see too good.  She’ll say “You’re killing me, Newlie,” but I know she doesn’t mean it. Honestly, if she really and truly didn’t like to play ball, she wouldn’t come out, would she? Mom says it’s not the ball she loves, but I don’t know what she means.

Mom is actually a terrible thrower. She is so bad that I think sometimes she must have some kind of birth defect. I tell you, when she throws the ball it never goes more than two feet away from her and never in the direction that she means for it to go. Early on, Dad told her to use an old tennis racket that was down in the basement and that has worked out fine. She can hit pretty good with it, from the front to the back of the yard, and our yard is nice and big. Mom likes to hit balls from corner to corner so that I get a work-out running back and forth across the yard. She has to stay very still, though, when this is going on, otherwise she will get mowed down by a hairy, 85 pound freight train. I like to fake her out, too, and start running for the corner where I think she is going to hit next. Sometimes I get there before she hits the ball and that’s a bummer. But I really love it when she hits a line drive and I jump up and catch it in my mouth! Mom always yells “Good boy!” when I do that and then starts muttering about how much it will cost to have a dentist fix my teeth.

Mom bought me a ball machine way back when I first came here, but it might be dead now. She used to use it sometimes as a change from hitting the ball with the racket. The way it works is that you put balls in a basket thing and then they roll down to the bottom and pop out. You can hear a little noise when it’s getting ready to go off and then Bam, it shoots the ball out into the yard. Mom actually hits it farther than the ball machine, but there is something so exciting about watching it pop out, hearing that little noise and waiting for it to fire. Sometimes, I couldn’t wait and would try to grab it away from the machine and then Mom would fuss and tell me that I was going to get my eyes put out if I wasn’t careful. Moms are awful silly sometimes.