Luke, 2015 adopted Sammi Fund senior dog

Things are going pretty well with Luke. Val was over again yesterday for a bit. They both wanted to play, but just not at the same time. It was rather comical. :)

He is not a fan of stairs still. He can do the couple up and down to go in the front door off the porch, but he'd prefer to just stay away from them. He HAS mastered walking by them though.

He wants to play with the cats more than they want to play with him. Two of them have figured out how to avoid the trigger to play: just walk naturally and slowly when around him. The third one is still learning that the best is to NOT run. It'll probably happen, just needs more time.

Attached is a pic of him hanging with us outside right now. We think we'll keep him. :)

He's SO sweet. We love having him as part of our family. The most difficult obstacle we have with him is his being such a picky eater. I've been making a mixture of chicken, veggies, rice or oatmeal, and eggs baked with kibble. He tends to like that. I try to hide as much kibble in there as possible as I sit with him and feed him. He doesn't appear to have lost weight, and he has pretty good poops, so it works I guess. :)

All in all we are committed to him. Do I need to do more to get his info on his chip converted to us?

Things are going pretty smoothly. I'm quite surprised by our cats. Gretel, the grouchy one has been the most welcoming of the three to Luke. Completely unexpected!! Then Hanzel is next by being not too bothered. And Bread Crumb is the most scared. Probably because he treed her two days ago. It happened so fast, all I could do was laugh. So there she is, up high in the tree (second story - in line with my son's bedroom window,) Luke eagerly waiting for her decent so he can play some more with her. And what happens next? A crow lands just above her and starts crowing at her. I got the tennis ball and managed to scare the crow off. Poor Bread Crumb! :)

Luke has made friends with Gretchen, the dog we regularly walk. She's part aradele. I took the pair of them out by myself this afternoon and Luke happily made it clear he was the alpha. I think Gretchen still needs some time to come to grips with that. :)

Here's a pic John was able to get of Luke meeting Valerie for the first time. (The evening of the 24th.) This was the first time he used his voice and gave a howl. Little romancer. They have a play-date scheduled for 5 this afternoon in the back yard. We anticipate it to go smoothly.

We have a couple of questions. Do you know why his previous owners gave him up? Also we've noticed he is afraid of our stairs to the basement. We've let him in from outside into our walk out basement and had him come UP the stairs. He does okay with that, but he will not walk by them to come back to the bedrooms. My son suggested we put treats along the way, so we tried that this morning. He was able to make his way past the stairs and explored the rooms beyond, but then was frozen and didn't want to go back to the living room becasue he had to pass the stairs again. Of course we helped him and he's fine, but we wondered if you knew of anything that would cause that?