The mornings have been pretty foggy around here.

It looks kinda neat, actually.

And kinda dreary and cold.

But I’ve been making the crew walk Penny in the mornings anyway. She needs the exercise before she gets shut in the house all day while we’re gone.

This is what it looked like before I enhanced the pictures a little bit.

I was a little freaked out about how well the boys blended in with their khaki pants and brown coats. The first couple days we added the dog-walking to our morning routine they had to get dressed in their school clothes first, then put on their boots and coats.

They walk her across the big field and back. These are pretty zoomed and cropped. I could barely see them from the house.

Then we ran into a school clothes laundry snag and discovered that Speedracer is so short that even with his pants tucked into his boots they still get wet to the knees from the grass.

What a good big sister! Speedracer has a hard time keeping up sometimes.

So now they suit up like it’s 50 below with hats and gloves (because they’re fun!) and head out in their jammies in the morning. Those don’t blend in so well. This morning the Cowboy was wearing blue and gray diagonal striped pants with a red and green hockey long-sleeved tee-shirt and the Ladybug was wearing blue and pink plaid flannel pants with a black candy-cane tee-shirt.

It probably takes them about 15 minutes to go across and back with Penny running here and there around them.

There’s no animals in the field right now and it’s pretty flat, and empty, and fenced in, so it’s pretty safe. I still watched them the whole time the first day or two. (Which totally defeats the purpose of sending them out alone while we make breakfast and pack lunches.) But I’m starting to relax a little bit about it.

The Cowboy likes to annoy his sister by lagging behind on purpose. Drives our little Mother Hen crazy!

Penny could probably run around out there for another hour in the morning without being tired. She’s hit that semi-defiant, high-energy, adolescent age and I’ve been restricting her unsupervised time in the yard so she can’t be barking at the animals or chasing them up and down the fence lines when we’re not there to correct it. (Since those are not habits a good farm dog should ever pick up!) And now we’ve added special exercise time in the morning and evenings, in addition to chore time.

Penny needs more mental focus with her exercise than our Pointer did. Yankee would just run around the field chasing smells all by himself for hours, or sleep. Penny will start digging holes and barking if she’s left outside by herself too long. The good news is that we have plenty of ways to get her plenty of exercise and joining her is good for us to0!

The Ladybug is the only dependable gate-latcher right now.

And she’ll probably out grow some of that too. She is still a baby, really, even though she doesn’t look like it anymore. She’s only 9 months old. Still a lot of puppy.

The good news about dog walking around here is that the kids don’t have to use a leash and they don’t have to carry a plastic bag. There’s nothing to it, really.

{And is it just me, or have the leave suddenly changed over night and now it’s Fall in Virginia?}

I swear I think she's put on another growth spurt just in the last month!

The kids have always been responsible for feeding and watering our pets. We usually do our dog-walking as a family in the evenings after chores, so this morning walk is something new, but it’s going pretty well.

I’ve always held that kids can’t be expected to be responsible for the family pet and that if you’re not ready to be solely responsible for it you shouldn’t bring one into your house. (I still do!) But it turns out that the biggest thing we have to do is supervise to be sure they’re doing it. Our kids really have been able to handle most of the day-to-day responsibilities themselves. How cool is that? (Training is all on me, though!)

Do your kids take responsibility for your pets?