เมื่อลูกๆ กลายเป็นเพื่อนของไอซ์

When we adopted Ice from a shelter outside Lat Krabang, my son was four and convinced she was a bear in disguise. She is a mixed breed, somewhere between a terrier and something much fluffier, and at three and a half she still has the energy of a puppy. For the first few months I worried more about the kids than about her. We read every rule we could find and stuck them on the fridge in Ari: never leave a child alone with a dog, never let anyone hug her from behind, always let her walk away.

What I did not expect was how much the children would teach her. My son learned to sit on the floor and wait until Ice came to him. My daughter, who is six, started reading picture books to her in the evenings, and Ice lies at her feet with her chin on the rug. Nobody told them to do this. It just happened as they got older and calmer.

Some evenings I sit on the balcony with my tea and listen to them argue about whose turn it is to feed her. Ice will not be here forever, and I think about that more than I expected. For now she sleeps under the bunk beds and wakes the whole house at six in the morning, which I think is exactly what she was meant to do.