Hi! My name is Youkilis, I am a golden retriever and I just turned 12 years old yesterday!

I live with my mommy and daddy; our house has six wheels and the three of us drive around the country and are always exploring things.  We live life to the fullest, which something that I’ve been trying to get my humans to understand how important that was my entire life.  Finally, they “get it.”  Life is too short, so you better take the time to enjoy it.

My daddy writes about our experiences and I told my daddy that I wanted to start sharing the stories about our fun too.  I tell my daddy what I want to say and he types it because my paws can’t use the keyboard.  We tried, but it wasn’t good.

Our house didn’t always have wheels, but my mommy and daddy got our new “wheeled house” for my birthday last year.  Mommy says that’s not true, but I know that they got it for my birthday.  They bought it on March 20, 2020, I turned 11 on March 28, 2020, so I know that it was definitely for my birthday.  Our wheel house sat next to our regular house for a while and we would just take it to places not too far away until August of 2020 when my mommy and daddy took everything out of our big house and we drove off to start our new adventure.

I’m going to tell you all about our adventures, but for this first blog thingy, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about me before I start telling you about the coolest life a dog could ever wish for.

I was born on March 28, 2009 at a place called Delaware Valley Golden Retriever Rescue.  That place rescued my birth mommy from a puppy mill when I was still growing inside her.  When I first opened my eyes there were all kinds of nice people around me and I had 10 other things that looked like me too.  They were my birth brothers and sisters.

These two really nice people started hanging out around us and would pick me up more than any of my brothers and sisters.  Other groups of people would come in too and it seemed like each group of people would just focus on one of us puppies in the group.  We didn’t really understand it, but all of my brothers and sisters seemed to like the humans that were focusing on each of them too.

My two humans were cool.  They seemed to really like me and I just loved them right away.  The first group of humans that I met started calling me Sonic and gave me an orange collar.  My two designated humans then started telling those people that they were going to call me Youkilis.  I didn’t have any idea what a Youkilis was and it sure wasn’t easy for me to remember at first.  I would later find out that my daddy was a huge Boston Red Sox fan and that Youkilis was the name of the Red Sox first and third-baseman at the time, Kevin Youkilis.  I guess my daddy missed the part that a dog’s name should be only two syllables long so that we can remember it easier, or maybe he just knew that I was a genius from the start.  I really like my name now and wish that I might someday meet the real Kevin Youkilis in our travels like my daddy did years ago.  Some people call me Youk for short, others call me Youky sometimes, so I guess I have names with one, two, and three syllables sometimes just to be safe.

Anyway, back to my humans.  A couple times they would bring some other dogs in with them and they would take me out to play with them.  Their names were Buddy, Tucker, and Cheyenne.  Buddy he was a golden retriever just like me, but he was older.  Tucker, I really liked him too, he was a yellow lab, and I just thought that he was the coolest guy that I ever met.  He was just a few months younger than Buddy.  I liked Tucker a lot!  Cheyenne was a girl and a border collie.  She was a little high strung and Buddy and Tucker did what she told them.  I have to be honest; I wasn’t really thrilled with Cheyenne at first, she was a little too bossy for me. Mommy and daddy and this other lady, who I would later call Auntie Robin would say that Cheyenne was the alpha of the pack.  I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t like having her boss me around.  For the most part I liked these occasional playmates though and I was really starting to love the two humans more and more each time that I saw them.

A few weeks later, just the lady came in to see me and we went for a ride together in her car.  When we stopped, she carried me out and put me in the grass so that I could pee, poop and smell.  I liked the smell; it was fresh and clean.  She picked me up again and took me inside where Buddy, Tucker, and Cheyenne were.  Two other humans who I never met came over later too, Stephanie and this tiny little thing that smelled kind of funny and they called Lillian.  I liked Lillian even though she kind of tugged on me at times.

Me as a puppy. Already exploring.

I was worried at first because the big guy that always came over to visit me with the lady wasn’t there and I really liked him.  Then two days later, he showed up.  He was kind of grumpy at first, I guess because he lost his baseball games at some place far away that weekend, but being around me seemed to cheer him up quite a bit.  It’s still that way you know.  For both my mommy and daddy, if their grumpy or sad, I can still make them smile right away.  Buddy and Tucker and Cheyenne told me that that was our biggest job for our humans – to make them happy and smile.  I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty good at my job.

Over the next few days, more and more new humans would come over to this new house.  My mommy and daddy have a big family.  They would all pick me up and smile and pet me and talk funny to me, it was really neat.  I liked the attention a lot, still do to be honest.

I liked everything about this new place except for one thing.  From the first day that I got there, Cheyenne started in on me.  Telling me all of the things that I could do and couldn’t do, nag, nag, nag.  She was always following me around, trying to herd me somewhere.  I just wanted to be left alone, do my thing and call the shots.  Buddy and Tucker, were both older than her, but they did whatever she told them to do.  I didn’t understand it at all.  They would always say to me, “Just do what she says kid, she’s the boss.”  I didn’t like that.  I thought that I should be the boss.

Well, a few months went by and I had enough of her telling me what to do.  I told Cheyenne what I thought and that I should be the boss.  I took a little bite out of her ear, and all of sudden, just like that, I was the new leader of our pack.  Cheyenne did forgive me though; we became best buds later.  Even though I was the boss, I still learned a lot from my older brothers and sister.  They taught me how to beg for food, give the guilty eyes to humans, smile, and always look on the bright side of things.

Most of all, they taught me to always love mommy and daddy.  They taught me that my sole purpose in life is to love my mommy and daddy and make them happy.  I should let them think that they came and rescued me, but truth be told, I was paired up with them by God to rescue them.  They’re good humans, they feed me things other than just dog food.  They take me on really cool walks.  Sometimes all three of us go, which are my favorite, and sometimes it’s just me and daddy, which I really love too, and sometimes other people come with us too, which is really neat for me.  I love my mommy and daddy.

Buddy and Tucker and Cheyenne told me that dogs are God’s angels here on earth.  We’re just one promotion to the Rainbow Bridge away from getting our wings.

Buddy and Tucker both got their wings and crossed the Rainbow Bridge in 2011 and Cheyenne crossed the bridge in 2016.  They all taught me so many things about how to be a good dog.  They all knew that one day, it would just be me to take care of mommy and daddy, so they all made sure that I would be ready to that when I had to.  I miss all three of them a lot and wish that they could be traveling around with me and mommy and daddy too.  I think that would be so neat for all four of us to be in the RV with mommy and daddy!  Just me and mommy and daddy is awesome too though.  I have spent so much time with my mommy and daddy since our house got wheels.  It’s the best thing ever.

Now that you have some background on me, I look forward to telling you all about my adventures of my four paws and six wheels across America.

I told daddy that I think that I can get the hang of this blog thingy.  He just smiled, and that means that I’m right!