From Black Dog to Dancing Queen

Last weekend while I was taking pictures at the Lawrence Humane Society, I was also enjoying the company of a great assistant volunteer photographer who came along to help me! Our friends Heather and Grant had a wedding to go to on Saturday, so we made plans to spent part of the weekend with their daughter Quillen, who decided she wanted to come to the shelter with me. Quillen has always been very good with animals, but she is especially soft-hearted and caring when it comes to dogs. We took many puppies out to play and met some wonderful new furry faces at the shelter. My favorite was Ace, a Coonhound who was a little sheepish but very sweet. Quillen's favorite was a little black Lab puppy named Emily, who was extremely calm for a puppy her age!

After Quillen's first LHS volunteer experience, she and Chad played some cards, and then we headed out to Village West for a little shopping! Quillen and I each got a new Life is Good t-shirt, while Chad got some cool new walkie-talkies, and Quillen picked out a very funny stuffed animal frog!

We decided to eat at The Legends in Village West, but as usual, the wait at every restaurant was super long. After checking out the T-Rex Cafe and deciding we didn't have that much patience, we settled on the Saddle Ranch Chop House right across the way. While it was mildly entertaining to watch people fall off of the mechanical bull, the wait was too long, the food was marginal and the atmosphere was annoyingly LOUD! We certainly wouldn't recommend the place!

Upon our arrival back in Lawrence, Quillen quickly changed into her new t-shirt and modeled some of our purchases before we headed to the basement for a few rounds of Dance Dance Revolution on the Xbox. After getting pooped out from dancing, we watched a few funny animal videos on YouTube, one of our favorites being Zoe the dancing parrot. By the time we headed off to bed, we'd had a very full and fun day!

Quillen is always great to have as a houseguest, and one of the many amazing qualities about her is that in her entire life, she's hardly ever complained about her bedtime! In fact, she's always the first to tell you when she's tired and ready for bed. Even when she was a tiny little preschooler, she would often tell her parents when she was ready to call it a night, which always amazed me!

Quillen is a very mature and well-behaved kid who is always great fun to be around! We keep telling her parents we're going to keep taking advantage of these years that she still wants to hang out with us, because after she heads off to junior high next year, we're guessing it's not going to be so cool to hang out with Kim and Chad!