Last week we brought home two adult dogs to help guard our rather large out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere property after two of the three puppies we were raising were very sickly and did not make it.

On Day Two of our new adventure with Goliath (a year-and-half old Rottweiler) and his buddy Dingo (an 8-month-old German Shepherd-Rottweiler mix), we suddenly lost track of Goliath and began looking for him all around our fenced-in property. We peered under our parked car, walked around each building, looked in and around the shrubs, and even recruited our 8-year-old son Jason to help us find a dog that is rather difficult to lose due to his size. We ended up scratching our heads, perplexed, wondering where on earth he was hiding when 10-year-old Josselyn came running out of our house and announced: “He’s in my room!”

Culturally here in Honduras, it is not appropriate to have a dog indoors, but even more than that we personally cannot have a 100+ pound Rottweiler in our tiny house that barely holds the 9 people who live there and that has to be cleaned from top to bottom just about every day due to dust, ants and other critters that waltz on in, dirt-caked barefoot children who run all around the place, and the general chaos that a busy household enjoys.

So my husband Darwin and I laughed and went to try to coax Goliath out of the girls’ bedroom. After several failed attempts, we laughed, shrugged, and decided to leave him there until he decided he was ready to leave.

About an hour or two later, I walked back in to see if this time he was ready to return to the yard, and I was surprised to find the girls’ room vacant. I began walking around the house somewhat tentatively, and as I turned the corner into the kids’ bathroom, this is what I found:

Once again, I tried to coax him out of his spot and into the yard, but he wouldn’t have any of it. So, I left him there. A couple hours later when Dayana, our eldest daughter, got home from her English class, we greeted her at the gate and walked with her as she entered our home to drop off her materials. We had warned her that Goliath had been in our house the whole morning, but we all thought that he was still resting in the shower. She opened the curtain to her bedroom, walked in care-freely to drop off her materials, but before taking two full steps into her room she screamed at the top of her lungs and ran out into the living room: Goliath had changed locations!

A couple hours later, Jackeline, our almost-12-year-old, began singing to Goliath and, according to her, he finally got up, followed her voice, and went to her in the living room before finally exiting the front door a while later. Mission accomplished!