Free The Puppy That Came for Christmas by Megan Rix

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    THURSDAY: TRAINING CLASS
    Meg took me to the Helper Dogs class this morning. I was so sleepy because Meg and Ian kept me up all night wanting to go out to the bark-chip area. I wouldn’t mind, but they never seemed to do anything when they got there. I met my brother Eddie at the class and we had a nice play together and he told me about the people he’s with—they kept him up all night too!
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    WEEKEND: TRAINING IAN
    Ian’s training is coming along well—although he keeps saying “Shake hands” for no reason. I’ve found that if I wave my paw at him when he says this he sometimes stops. They also keep asking me to sit—can’t they see I’m much too busy to sit down?
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    MONDAY: TOYS
    Meg put my toys in something called a washing machine and they spun round and round. I didn’t like it. I was worried about my favorite toy Spiky—I like to cuddle up to him at night and carry him around by his ear.
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    WEDNESDAY: ELVIS
    I went to play with another Helper Dogs puppy today. His name’s Elvis. He’s a little black Labrador. Elvis loves sleeping even more than me. I tried to show Elvis how my mum carried me by the scruff of my neck when I was a baby, but Elvis didn’t like it.
    Jamie said the piece made him cry, which I took to be a vote of endorsement, but the newspaper found it too long and cut it mercilessly—so much that it may as well have been written by a dog, for all the sense it made. I felt I’d let Emma down and from then on always came in bang on my word limit, so they’d have as little justification to cut as possible.
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    Emma was much keener on traveling in the car now that she had a car harness and could sit in the front seat. So I arranged one day to meet Eddie, Elvis, Liz and Jo at a country park. Waiting at one set of lights, the man in the car next to us rolled his window down and asked if he could buy Emma from me. I told him I wouldn’t sell her for any price, but as I drove on a little voice at the back of my head kept on repeating that Emma would be leaving me, whether I wanted her to or not. When she’d arrived, six months had seemed a long time, but, in the whirlwind of new duties and watching her grow, two months had passed in a flash. With every walk, every game and every bark, the day was coming closer. I turned on the radio and pushed the thought aside. It was too horrible to think about.
    Emma was over the moon to see Eddie and Elvis. She loved to scrap with her brother while Elvis looked on, bemused. She’d recently worked out that if she grabbed hold of another puppy’s collar with her teeth then the other puppy had to go where she wanted. Eddie was too fast and too wise to fall for this more than a few times, but she managed to hoodwink Elvis all afternoon. The park had a shallow lake that was perfect for dogs to paddle and swim in. Emma was having a lot of fun splashing around with Elvis (who loved any water and once ran under a Great Dane, so he could be showered with wee) and then suddenly started paddling. She was swimming!
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    â€œEmma’s had her first swim!” I excitedly told Ian on the phone.
    Jamie wasn’t quite so impressed.
    Swimming isn’t advised as a regular activity as it may be hard for some disabled people to dry the dog off afterward, although it is good for the dog to be at home in the water. More than one Helper Dog has saved its owner from drowning, and one I heard of, Waldo, even pulled his owner, Gary, from the shower floor when Gary had a fit and fell unconscious. He then put Gary into the recovery position, covered him with a blanket and ran to a neighbor’s house to get help.
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    To celebrate her newspaper column and first swim, we took Emma to the pet shop to choose a new toy. Not that she needed any more: she now had two toy boxes, both pretty full. Ian loved buying things for her and rarely came home without something for Emma or