Welcome — meet Bo and Stella

Bo is on the floor, half-asleep, one paw stretched into the kitchen in case anything edible falls. Stella is on the couch, watching me type this with the slightly suspicious expression she reserves for laptops. It is a Thursday evening and they have already had their walk, their dinner, and their second negotiation of the day about who gets the rug.

We have lived with both of them long enough now that things have started to repeat. The way Bo sighs the moment his head touches the floor. The way Stella will eat one piece of kibble out of her bowl and then come back for the rest twenty minutes later, as if she just remembered it. The way the two of them divide up the couch in the evenings — Bo at the corner, Stella across the cushion, with a single inch of fabric between them that is somehow inviolable.

I started writing these things down because I kept forgetting them. A specific Tuesday in March when Stella decided she didn't like the brown harness. The week Bo stopped pulling on the lead. The first thunderstorm. By the time I tried to remember any of it, the details had already softened.

The notes that came out of those entries are what this section is. Some of them are answers to questions I had to look up — is this sleeping normal, is this sigh normal, when do they stop chewing the furniture — and those became the Q&A pages. Some are just stories. The ones where the dog is the entire point, not a case study.

There's also a third reason. We make Tamadoggo, which is a journal for your dog's life. I'd rather show you what that looks like than tell you. The notes here are what I've been writing in mine.

What I'm watching for next

Stella is six this year and her energy curve has finally rounded off — long evenings on the couch are the default now, and walks that used to be a battle for forward motion are a calm sniff through the park. Bo is still finding his settle at four and a half. I want to write about that gap. About how two dogs of the same breed, same household, same routine, end up so differently shaped at the same age.

That'll be a later note.