I love dogs. I grew up with them and every time I see one (my friends can vouch for this) I go into full childish glee and go over to see if I can pet the dog. I have had five dogs in the past, and only one of them was not a good fit for us. Though the past four—I am excluding the one who didn’t fit our family—were amazing dogs, I want to talk about the little monster we have right now, known as Sirius.
My mom and dad adopted a purebred black lab puppy back in 2018 on May 20th. As a family, my mom, dad, and brother, and I all agreed to name him Sirius Mavros Zalewski––Sirius for Sirius Black from Harry Potter and Mavros is “black” in Greek. Sirius is a good dog. He is almost three years old but acts like a six-month-old puppy still.
As an almost three-year-old dog—he turns three on April 2nd—that still acts like a six-month-old puppy there are some… interesting occurrences in our household. For example, he barks––all the time. I will be sitting on the couch in our family room and he will be standing in front of me barking for no reason. He also likes to bite, but he never bites hard. If I scratch his belly for too long, he nibbles on my hands while doing so. He is such a cute dog when he does this, even though sometimes it does hurt my hand a bit.
As a family, we take Sirius for walks, since he always has so much energy, and out of the other 4––still excluding the one that didn’t fit for us––he is the dog we have trained the most for walks. We take him daily, and he knows several commands on our walks, even though he doesn’t always listen. I live out in the country, so we live on a busy-ish road. So one of the commands we have taught him is “line” which means for him to stay on the white line or in the ditch. We also have taught him the classic tricks like “sit” and “stay” and he even does them on our walk. And finally, the last trick we taught him is “far enough” which means he needs to slow down. We let him off the leash because we can keep a close enough eye on him on the road, so he wouldn’t run away from us for long.
Sirius also is able to sleep outside of his kennel at night, although our rule is he stays out of our hallway, which is where our bedrooms are. He still sleeps next to my bed every night. Sometimes I will take a shower at 10:30 pm, then walk into my room, and when I am done he is peacefully sleeping or laying down right next to my bed. The best part is, when I walk closer to my bed, he wags his tail, and nothing is more stress-relieving than the calming sound of the thump thump thump of a puppy’s tail.
Finally, Sirius has the cutest howl. When we let him outside, we have him on a chain, because he has gone into our neighbor’s so much, and if he wants to come in, he sits on the furthest corner of our deck and howls. But it isn’t a loud howl. It is this little quiet, mournful “awoooooooo” that you hear, and the howl makes a squealing sound at the beginning of it. He is a great dog, and I love getting to see him every time I go home.