The Stellar Stella: She Loves Football

It’s been a couple days now since Stella has made her way into our hearts and home. She really is just an absolute giant ball of friendly fluff!

She’s been resting for her heartworm treatment (officially one week as of Friday!) and taking lots of naps all over the house. One of her favorite places is to lie by me while I’m working (aww!), in the middle of the kitchen during dinner hour, or over by the couch in the family room – she’ll normally go there to chew her bone.

And she loves her bones. We bought her a hard-coated one with the hopes it would last for quite a while (it took our old dog about a month to get through one). Less than 24 hours later… we have a tiny chip left.

Getting Stella to eat her normal food though has been a bit trickier. She was being spoiled with a human-food diet for weeks and it’s been hard to get her to want her own food (and I don’t blame her!). We’re trying to avoid adding in anything extra – like the chicken broth that she came with – and have now started adding some warm water to make it more gravy-like and bring out the flavor. She seemed to eat it a little better tonight, so fingers crossed!

Stella also has gotten a bath (of sorts). She didn’t like the hose when we showed it to her, and there was no way we were going to be able to hold an 80lb dog in a bath tub, so she got a warm sponge bath in the backyard to get rid of all the oil. She’s now super fluffy and so pet-able. Seriously, I would love to spend my entire day just petting her and she’d like that too.

I also learned that unlike Lexi, Stella barks. Very loudly. We were sitting in the kitchen when all of a sudden she starts barking and barking staring out the window. The object of her ire? The tarp on my neighbor’s patio table. We had to take a stroll out there and show her it meant her no harm.

Stella also LOVES football. Well, not quite the one on t.v., but she loves her toy football. I gave it to her to play with (she hadn’t like many of the other toys we had) and she just went at it. She’ll chase it if you throw it, she’ll throw it herself and tackle over anyone who gets in her way. She’s quite literally a quarterback, receiver, running back and linesman all in one. Wish I had her for my fantasy team!

You can catch some of her antics in the video above. Since she’s still recovering from heartworm treatment we don’t let her play for long so she doesn’t get too excited, but you try stopping a huge puppy from wanting to chase her football.

But what does Stella like to watch on t.v.? Animal Planet, apparently. We turned it on to see if she’d take notice and she loved the little puppies playing on the screen (see picture above). However, she’s not too big into real dogs that we’ve seen. She’s not aggressive or anything, she just doesn’t seem to want to play with them. We’re hoping once she has a few more weeks of rest and recovery under her built we’ll take her on a walk through the neighborhood and see if she wants to meet any of the dogs we find.

Now back to Monday night football! 

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