Maiki makes a comeback ...

When Maiki was a tiny puppy, I enjoyed teaching her tricks and recording fun little videos.  But it’s been more than a year since Maiki’s last trick video.  After she fractured her knee last spring, we were left with other priorities - like strengthening the injured leg and dealing with some behaviour issues arising from the long months of being forbidden to run and play like puppies need to do.  Next she was diagnosed with a heart defect and then it was time for surgery as I’d chosen to have her spayed. Now, having overcome all this challenges, and a full year after the trick video I made with both Maiki and Teddi last April, I decided this month that it was time to learn some tricks again. Maiki’s back, and here she is with 50 border collie tricks. You can see the new video by clicking here on the photo above. We enjoyed making it and we hope you enjoy watching it!

 

Palm Sunday on the Mount of Olives...

It's Palm Sunday and a lovely sunny day in contrast to the recent rainstorms. Our Sunday afternoon walk was on the hillside that forms the backdrop to our town. I call it the "Mount of Olives" because the summit is scattered with wild or abandoned olive groves.

I hate olives, to be honest - something that is rather incomprehensible to my Spanish friends. We live, after all, in the greatest olive producing region of the world.

Maiki, on the other hand, is a Spaniard to the core, and pigged out on a small quantity of wild olives before we stopped to take a breather and admire the views from the mountain top.

Don't discount the small steps...

 Have you ever felt a bit discouraged because you didn’t seem to be making much progress towards some goal you’d set yourself? It could be a challenge like learning a foreign language, playing a musical instrument or losing weight… It could be something about your relationship with God - such as spending more time in prayer or reading the Bible from cover to cover. It’s easy to look at where we want to be, and feel that we’re not really making much progress. But something happened this week that reminded me of the value of noticing and celebrating the small victories and not only the big ones. 

Here in Spain, the dogs and I count our kilometres and donate them to a charity that raises funds for research into multiple sclerosis. Our goal is always to walk at least the same number of kilometres as the year: 2022 km this year. 

Over the past few years, I’ve only counted our “real walks” of minimum three or four kilometres and not even bothered to set the app on my phone if I was only walking down the road to the supermarket. But after last year, when both Maiki and I myself had injuries that prevented us from walking for several weeks, I began this year to set the app for all of our walks, even the shorter ones.

And on Thursday, I really noticed the difference this has made. When I calculated our running total for the end of March, I discovered that we’d already clocked up 968km - which puts us almost half way to our annual target. In previous years, we had only reached around 600 km by the end of March.

Sometimes we don’t bother to count, or even notice our small successes, because we think they’re not big enough to make a difference. Sometimes we don't even bother to try, because we believe we're not able to do something big enough. This week, I found proof that lots and lots of small efforts really do add up to a big difference.

What aspect of your life has got you feeling discouraged at the moment? Instead of thinking about all the big things you can't do to bring a change, just step out and do some of the small things that will make at least some kind of difference. 

The picture is of my gang (Nelson, Hugo, Maiki and Buba) posing proudly for this month’s milestone photo. Getting two to hold their “sit” and the other two to hold their “down” wasn’t the hard part; getting all four of them to look at the camera at the same time took five attempts!!