Forget "the dog ate my homework"--"the bird ate your dog" could be worse.

Our poor little dog, Mabey, has never managed to grow beyond 4.5 lbs.  She's getting the royal treatment while we're gone, staying at three different homes where she is, of course, being coddled.  Still--she remains tiny.  Apparently, her size could get her in trouble.  We really chuckled as we read the following email from our good neighbors who tended her for the first 10 days.

"We thought we let you know of a kind of 'funny/oh my goodness' experience we had with your pooch this afternoon. 

We were enjoying the nice afternoon, sitting in the backyard, not doing much.  When all of a sudden, a Gray Hawk(or so we think it was after looking up bird pictures on the internet) swooped in and perched about 20 feet over our heads into the middle Ash tree in front of us.  'How Cool!' we thought and then it flew over a few branches over and perched again.  As it landed on the other branch, Teresa could see out of the corner of her eye, 'Mabey', right below where the bird landed.  She excitedly exclaimed, "Mabey!!!".  Immediately, it was a race to scoop her up just in case the bird had the same idea.

Mabey is safe and sound in the house now and doing wonderfully, skillfully avoiding Abbie's loving arms.

We thought you might get a kick out of this as we've never seen a hawk in the backyard before.  Kind of strange and probably not coincidental that we saw it back there.  I doubt it would have actually tried, probably just sizing her up.

Take Care and enjoy your trip.

We'll keep our eyes to the sky when Mabey is out.

P.S.  We now think it was a Peregrine Falcon."