Everyone keeps asking about our great guard dog, Simba.  By the time we left Malawi at the end of May, he was already a very large dog, weighing over 80 pounds, though only 7 months old.  We can’t wait to see how big he’ll be when we get back in September!

This picture was taken the first of May.  We’d been measuring Simba the first of every month to keep track of how much he’d grown.  You can see the marks on the wall.  The lowest mark is how tall he was to the shoulder on the day we brought him home, November 30, 2009.  He has easily tripled his height in the 5 months depicted on this post, making him over 2 foot tall at the shoulder.  And that was the beginning of May.

But we do have footage of what a great guard dog Simba is.  He’s part Rhodesian Ridgeback, and Ridgebacks were bred to be lion hunters.  We figure if a lion ever comes to attack us in a wheelbarrow, we’ll be safe…