Somebody's growing!

You can see that his face has gotten more of the brown hair over the black hair on it now, and it's gotten much longer, but the bulk of his body is still very black. Both of his brothers are showing signs of the "steel blue"/silver color hair coming in at this point (Sparky has it over his entire body, but still has the black tips; Pete is getting it on his head). Charlie is still the smallest of the three brothers, by quite a bit. We'll get his official weight this week at the vet, but he wasn't quite 3lbs a few weeks ago when we were in, and Sparky just weighed in at 4.5lbs and he's quite a bit larger than Charlie, so I suspect we're sitting under 4lbs still. LOL

Charlie is MUCH more active and animated and is really taking an interest in fetching toys and playing tug-of-war. He hasn't quite grasped the concept of letting go of the toy he's fetched, so we generally have to have two things when we play with him. We throw the 2nd thing as soon as he brings the first thing back and he drops the first thing to run for the 2nd. Not a perfect system, but works out okay! He is also big enough and brave enough to have figured out that he can just jump over the bin we had blocking the doorway from the kitchen to the diningroom (which leads into the CARPETED livingroom), so we had to dig out the ol' baby gate again. It's old and doesn't work well (doesn't want to wedge tightly into the doorframe), and unfortunately, pretty sucessfully blocks children as well, but it's better than letting Charlie get into parts of the house where he's not currently welcome! ha!

The kids have really been enjoying Charlie. He tolerates their over-love very well, and when he's truly had enough, he comes running for me. The kids know to leave him alone if he's come over to me. He's very playful, which they enjoy, and he's not big enough to be an issue if he's jumping around on them during play. He's a little nibbly, but backs right off, and never does it hard or meanly. We all enjoy watching Heidi (our black lab) and Charlie play together. Heidi is very gentle with him, but doesn't let him be a total pest either. They play a funny game of chase, where Heidi will run for a short distance, then Charlie will start tearing around the yard in fast circles while Heidi stands and watches. Then Charlie realizes she's not running with him and he'll head back over and nibble at her toes and jump around at her as if to say, "Come on old girl (she's 9), keep up!" LOL!

I'll be happy when he's house-trained, but am greatful for the easy clean-up of Pergo flooring for now!

Hard to believe he's already pretty much doubled in size!!

oh, and Dan convinced me to knit the little booger a sweater, which I've almost completed (not a perfect fit, but having never knit one before to know how much the pattern needed to be adjusted, I'd say it's not half bad!), and will share pictures when I'm done. He'll need a better one now that I have a better idea of what I'm doing (gotta give myself projects, you know!)