For Fun People Who Love Dogs

Not the board game. Grover couldn't tell a rook from a rawhide. But he taught me the actual thing — thinking three moves ahead, always knowing what came next. He was the kind of dog who was larger than life, a little mischievous, and always, always ready for the party. This is the dog who once ate a hole clean through the dining room wall. His sister Cherry came to me first, head down, ready to take the fall for him. And then in strolled Grover, grinning ear to ear, tee

Episode Two of More Aire than Dale: First Winter in Rhode Island It's about 100 degrees in Florida right now, without the heat index doing me any favors, and here I am writing about snow. Bear with me. Remember the road trip I mentioned last week? This is the continuation. By the time we settled into Rhode Island, it was late summer. Fall didn't stick around long, and winter showed up fast. Halo, Cherry, and Grover had never seen snow before in their lives. They were

My Airedales have covered thousands of miles, and not one of them started out being easy in a car. Our success with traveling came from work, not luck. It began years ago with one sentence: "We're going to Dallas for six months." I had a client there and a project that needed an extended stay, and if I was going, the dogs were going too. The drive from Rhode Island to Texas was a lot more than a three-hour tour. Eight hours a day for four days is a lot of car time. So we

When I was a kid, I was not a fan of the dark. To fall asleep, I needed two things: a nightlight and an Airedale on the bed. The nightlight took care of the shadows. The Airedale took care of everything else. I didn't know it had a name back then. I just knew I slept better with a dog next to me, and I have never really outgrown that feeling. Turns out there's a name for it — and my whole pack runs on it. Turns out the buddy system is real. Social buffering — also calle

We're standing at the Lincoln Memorial. Three Airedales, matching new tags, freshly chipped, thoroughly unbothered by the crowd gathering around us. Strangers are asking to take photos with Halo, Cherry, and Grover like they're minor celebrities. I'm smiling for pictures I don't remember agreeing to be in. And I have no idea, until much later, that we're standing somewhere dogs aren't allowed. That's later in the story. Let me back up. By 2012 I'd traveled with my dogs plenty

As you can tell, as an Airedale mom, I'm obsessed with the breed. It's also because they've had such a positive impact on my life over the past fifty years. But let's get into the real topic of this newsletter 😉 In March 1918, in the last year of World War I, an Airedale named Jack slipped out of a trench with a message tucked into the pouch on his collar. His battalion, the Sherwood Foresters, was trapped at an advanced post four miles from headquarters. Every line of commu

Four Airedales and an armadillo, all before 7 AM. Hudson gets everyone up at 6:25 sharp. No alarm clock needed; he is very consistent about it. Wednesday, we went outside like always, and I was in the kitchen when I heard a commotion that sounded different from our usual commotion. It was barely dawn. I went to look, and the chase was already on. I called. No one listened. So, I threw on my emergency sneakers (the old pair I keep by the back door for exactly this) and ran out

Two Airedales. Same bloodline. Half-brothers, actually. Both ended up living in the White House within a few years of each other. One got his own chair at cabinet meetings. The other got sent to the Marines. If you read my last newsletter, then you'd remember that we met Davie last week. The quiet Airedale who kicked off a three-president streak. Today we get to the loud half of the family, and the contrast is the whole story. The Good Brother Laddie Boy belonged to President

Here's a piece of Airedale history almost nobody knows. For three presidents in a row, the dog strutting around the White House was an Airedale Terrier. And the one who started it all? He left almost no trace. His name was Davie. Davie belonged to Woodrow Wilson, our 28th president, and he holds a funny little spot in history. He was so well-behaved that he was practically invisible. While later White House Airedales made headlines for chair-sitting and ankle-biting, Davie ju

Before "First Dog" was even a phrase, there was an Airedale named Laddie Boy — sitting in on Cabinet meetings, in his own assigned chair. Before there was a White House Instagram account, before "First Dog" was even a phrase people used, there was an Airedale named Laddie Boy sitting in on Cabinet meetings with President Warren G. Harding. He had his own chair. I want to be clear about that. An actual assigned seat at the Cabinet table — and nobody seemed to think it was stra

The USA turns 250 this July 4th. I've been going down memory lane — and it turns out Airedales have more to do with American history than most people know. As a kid, summer meant no school, riding bikes, swimming at the rec park, family vacations, and more time with Kandy — my first Airedale. We always spent time with both sets of grandparents, in New Windsor and Keuka Lake, both up in New York. And this particular July has me thinking about all of it more than usual. This Ju

Why does Erwitt always check the sky — and what does science actually say about that? I was out on the front porch this morning with a few of the dogs when a hawk made a lazy pass overhead. Nothing dramatic. Just a hawk doing hawk things at a polite altitude. But Erwitt caught it. He looked up, tracked it, and issued what I can only describe as an official perimeter alert. Ears forward, full commitment. The kind of bark that says he has taken this personally. Then I watched F

May is almost over, and this is our last cancer-focused post for Pet Cancer Awareness Month. I wanted to end where the story ended best. The Day Everything Got Lighter Remission isn't exactly a place on a map, but we treated it like one. We had a destination. We had a route. And Grover finished his last Wisconsin Protocol treatment right on schedule — on his seventh birthday. Not the most glamorous way to spend a birthday, but what a present. Something shifts when you get tha

I wrote this piece about ten years ago, while sitting with my dog Grover in the lobby of the canine cancer center. Reading it again now — with Fleetwood curled up at my feet — I'd still write it the same way today. The lobby of any doctor's office can be intimidating, and I'm just talking about the regular doctor. I start to sweat before my own appointments. So imagine entering the lobby of a specialist — in our case, a canine cancer center. Grover, being Grover, decided to h

"What do you mean Grover can’t receive treatment?" That was an outside-voice moment — with tears. We’d just started chemo, and the first treatment seemed to go smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly. So when we returned to the cancer clinic for round two and Grover’s oncologist came out and said, “Grover won’t be able to receive chemo today,” it felt like a gut punch all over again. They’d run a complete CBC and checked his vitals and weight. The results told the story: Grover

Forty-eight hours after the diagnosis, I was sitting in an oncologist's office being told my dog had "good" lymphoma. What? My dog has what? I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Good cancer. I turned those two words over in my head and — somehow — felt relieved. If you'd told me a week earlier that I'd ever be grateful for a type of cancer, I would have thought you'd lost your mind. And honestly, I kind of lost mine for a minute too. If you're joining mid-story — hi, I'm Ki

If you're new here, hi — I'm Kim, and I have five Airedales. Grover was my fifth ever Airedale and the inspiration behind Happy Aire. His full story is in the previous post. May 1st kicks off National Pet Cancer Awareness Month, which feels like exactly the right moment to talk about something I wish someone had shown me a long time ago: how to check your dog for early signs of cancer, and when to do it. What seems obvious now did not a decade ago. I had no road map. Here's o

I vividly remember the call from the vet’s office with the lab results. I had just gotten home and was standing in the driveway when it came in. Canine lymphoma. It can take several calls before the reality of certain information sinks in. I’m not hard of hearing, but I must have asked them to repeat the diagnosis at least four times. It was like an out-of-body experience. You hear every word. You know what the words mean. But your outside voice doesn’t know what to say, and

Does anyone remember the bumper sticker "Dog is My Co-Pilot?" I probably just dated myself. Lately, I've noticed a shift happening in my house, from co-pilot to co-dependent. I think working from home might be to blame. The Fab 5 have always wanted to be my co-pilot, which would make for a very crowded cockpit, but that's beside the point. The Old Routine For most of my career, I traveled weekly. Every Tuesday I dropped the pack at doggie daycare for boarding and headed to th

You guessed it…I’m talking about Fleetwood. For those of you who don’t know Fleetwood, he is one of my Airedales and he loves - loves - to have a job. 😀 By having the envelope pushed, we've accomplished a lot together, from basic obedience to recall. But lately, I have a feeling that Fleetwood is ready to push that envelope again. Wired for Work Fleetwood loves to work. He's a wire-haired terrier, after all — maybe I shouldn't be surprised by his enthusiasm. I'm convinced