Chelsea is a cream colored Golden Retriever, all soft fur and a bigger personality than her 60 pound frame suggests. She has been a Vroom Grooms regular for a while now, and she is the kind of dog who makes the driveway part of the appointment fun.
If you have ever pulled up to a house and had a sixty pound dog launch herself at your front tire before you are even fully parked, that is Chelsea. The whole body goes. Tail, butt, shoulders, ears. I have had clients peek out the window when I am still in the street and laugh because they can hear her tags jingling from inside the van. By the time I get the door open she is already spinning in the grass.
There is a Goldens-are-happy-to-see-me line and then there is Chelsea. She does not do a polite sniff and a wag. She does a full body wiggle where her back end swings so far sideways she almost loses her balance, and the wiggle is over before I have even turned the engine off. I let her have that part. And the thing that makes the wiggle really pay off is the bandana at the end of the visit. She gets a new one every time, a different theme to match the season or whatever is going on that month, and I pick it before I open the door to bring her back out. She wears it like a trophy the whole way down the walkway, and I usually get a photo of her right before her person opens the front door. That is the part of this job I never get tired of. The driveway wiggle on the way in, the bandana strut on the way out, and a dog who actually wants to come back next time.
Once she is actually in the van she is a different dog. Not in a bad way, just in a settled way. The wiggle turns into a sigh, and she parks herself on the purple mat like she owns the place. Her favorite spot during the bath is the very back of the tub where the water pressure is gentlest. She will stand there with her eyes half closed while I do the rest of the work. If I move too fast past her ears she will give me a slow side eye and then go right back to ignoring me.
In between, the grooming itself is the easy part, and that is because her family keeps up with her. By the time I see her she is usually brushed out, her ears are clean, and the only real work I am doing is the bath, the blow out, and a tidy up around her feet and sanitary area. That is the ideal. A full groom every six to eight weeks on a coat like hers keeps everything manageable. If we ever stretched it to three months I would be fighting mats behind her ears and in her feathering, and that is the conversation nobody wants to have on the driveway.