Just two more weeks to go...

We went to visit Sadie today. It was her first time on the grass, and she didn't know what to do with it. So she tried eating it, and lying on it, and then decided that it was most fun to run on it. So run she did... straight to the puppies in the puppy yard (older than she). She didn't know there were other puppies besides her own litter, which is in the "nursery."

Right now her eyes are blue, but when she is an adult, they will be amber. I love the puppy stage, but I can't wait for her to be all grown up! She is going to be beautiful!

Last night I dreamed that we had gone out to see Sadie and that they brought the wrong puppy out to me. I kept insisting that it was the wrong puppy and they kept insisting that it wasn't. And then the ranch was infested with fire ants and we had to run to get away from them. Dreams. Strange things.

Sadie is smaller than her sister, who was the smaller of the two when we saw them last week. That's a good thing. I want a small dog. Her little brother is tiny tiny... so little you'd think he was a good two weeks younger. He's more sedate than my puppy, although how sedate can a puppy be? She plays with her sister more than her brother, though.

That's all for now. Random thoughts. My ADD is working overtime these days, and it's really hard to follow a train of thought.

Until next time...

Counting the Days

All I can think of is puppies. Toy Aussie puppies, to be exact. Eighteen days until I can pick her up! She'll actually be ready to go two days earlier, but I can't get out there until Saturday, eighteen days from now. I feel pregnant! The last few weeks just D-R-A-G!

I've given Mac some more training with the clicker, and he's doing well. A little here, a little there. He will sit up right quick, even when I don't want him to. It's so funny to watch him go through his repertoire, trying to figure out the behavior I want. And there's no problem teaching "watch"; his eyes never leave mine. But all this is getting ahead of himself. I want to follow a clear direction, and so far, it's all chaos. I've ordered a couple of books from Amazon on clicker training, so maybe I can get a plan in order before too long. Meanwhile, I'm just working on the things I know he will do. He doesn't offer anything reliably yet. More tries it till it works, gives it to me again, but then might offer something else entirely.

There are some good places to find things out on the web. Karen Pryor's site is the best by far, but there are others as well. Clicker Solutions is another informative site, as well as DoggieBuddy, a site that has 52 tricks to train your dog (1 a week for an entire year!). There are so many more, and as I have the time to look further into them, I'll post an amateur's review. The advantage of being an amateur is that I'll look for things that make it really easy to understand and follow. I'll post all the information resources I can find that are not overwhelming, because I probably won't read those that I find too scholarly. (Not that I'm not scholarly. I subscribe to Off-Lead and Animal Behavior Magazine, after all.) I just don't have the time to spend consuming all that information and breaking it down into easily understood lingo. (I used to do that for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.)

Until next time!