Our First Follow Up
Yara’s new thing with food is to remind me every five seconds while it soaks that she would like her food. She paces around the house the entire time it soaks and will come up to nudge me with these sad eyes. I can just hear her little doggy mind saying, “Hey, Mom, my dinner’s on the counter. Don’t forget, okay?” After she has finished eating, she searches the house for her bone and lays down by me chewing it. One could argue that she’s cleaning her teeth, but Dolly used to do the same thing and I always took it as dog-speak for, “I’m hardly satisfied by the previous meal.”
Anyway, this morning Tommy was here for our first follow up visit. We talked some about how things are going both in and out of harness and then took a decent walk downtown. All in all, he seemed very impressed with us as a team, noting that we seemed more like we’d been together for many years and not just over five weeks. I totally agree, I’m still incredibly impressed with how smoothly things have been with Yara and how quickly we’ve settled with one another. Basically, the only things he said I should work on are to keep on her when she’s “charging forward.” He suggested, aside from corrections alone, to stop prefacing commands with her name as it seems to be building her anticipation and excitement. “Whatever you’re doing with her,” he said, “keep doing it, it’s working.” I think that made my whole day, seriously.
Back home, Yara headed straight for her bed and crashed. Really, you’d think she’d run the Boston Marathon. Funny girl.
In somewhat unrelated news, and in answer to some questions I’ve received, yes I do plan to finish adding the other sections to this site . . . just not right now. But sometime, yes!
The Whoopie Cushion Duck
Yara has a mallard duck toy I got her for Christmas that has a noisemaker in it to quack. Except it sounds more like a whoopie cushion. Right now she’s running around the house making it “quack” and I’m having this mental image of a stampeding horde of flatulent dogs tearing around my house.
In other news, I have a very promising job interview next Friday. I’m a bit pained as I’m thinking it would be best to leave my girl home. Hopefully, she’ll be all right with this.
Winter Weather
Today’s high was 63°F; it was awesome! Yesterday was in the fifties and it’s not supposed to drop below 30 before next Monday (when it’s supposed to snow).
Megan called today to let me know that Tommy will be stopping by Thursday morning for my first follow up with Yara. I think it’s supposed to rain, but otherwise it should be fine enough to get some street work in. I’ve got this niggling feeling that there’s something I’m forgetting that I want to talk to an instructor about but every time I have Megan on the phone I can’t remember what it is. Maybe I’ll think of it for Thursday.
In other news, my dad called the other day and apparently he bought new living room furniture so he’s giving me one of his old sofas and a recliner. I’m not actually sure which sofa he’s planning on bringing, but either way I’m very excited. Need to get motivated to take down the Christmas tree, though, since I’ll need to rearrange the whole living room for the new furniture. Not sure where I’ll stick Yara’s giant fleece bed either.
A Lab in GSD Clothing
I’ve come to believe that when Yara was reading the breed standard, there must have been some pages stuck together that overlapped her onto the Labrador page. Granted, she’s not exactly Dolly 2.0, but I have to say now that she’s settled a bit I’m noticing she’s very “lab-like.”
I’ve been giving her some playtime when we get home for the day to just unwind a bit and she’s kind of a ditz about the whole fetch and retrieve thing. She plays really hard for about ten minutes and then she starts forgetting to bring the toy when she runs off or she drops it halfway. And afterwards she’s a complete couch potato for the rest of the day. She was so immobile the other day I nearly forgot to feed her dinner!
Speaking of dinner, the food strike is definitely over. In fact, while her kibble soaks, she now holds vigil over it like perhaps it magically will move itself from the counter to the floor for her. She’s still a painstakingly slow eater, though. I think her foster family must have trained her to chew every bite 42 times before swallowing or something. The best part, is when she’s finished her meal. She searches the house for me and plops herself as close as she can to me and promptly burps in my face. Truly, it’s quite gross.
She is, however, getting much better with the people distractions. She has her moments where everyone and his kid is like the most interesting thing ever, but for the most part she’s really good about staying on task. Every now and again she’ll get a bit stressed out by crowds on the street or a store and she’ll basically get stuck. It’s like no matter which direction she chooses someone will cut her off and she’ll just give up trying and won’t move.
The Holidays and the New Year
I know in my last post I promised that I’d be back with many an update and photo after the holidays, but things have just been far too hectic and crazy to sit down and write everything out. All in all, though, everything has been pretty good and I’m glad to finally be on an almost normal schedule and routine with Yara.
My uncle’s wedding was an interesting experience. I was very shocked that both Dolly and Yara had their own program¹ and gift bags. Aside from some soft whining throughout the ceremony, both dogs were very good. I’m sure we were quite the spectacle walking in late with two dogs, especially since we were sitting right up in the very front. At the reception word spread pretty quickly about the dogs. It did amuse me that no one could keep the dogs straight as to which was whom and I must have explained how to pronounce Yara’s name about a hundred times. They both seemed to really enjoy all the attention they were getting, but once the waiters started circulating with the hors d’?uvres, Dolly became quite a handful and as we were staying the night at the mansion, Dad put her in one of the rooms for the remainder of the reception.
Yara, on the other hand, was on her very best behavior. She did whine a bit here and there, but for the most part she was content to just lie on the floor. I did give her a few breaks both outside and in my room to relieve some of her pent up energy and de-stress a bit. Not surprisingly, she didn’t touch her dinner or breakfast the next morning, but she did eat some treats from her gift bag.
We spent the rest of the days until Christmas at my father’s and it was a mixture of fun and stress with the two dogs. Dolly’s such a timid and submissive dog; not to mention old and fat. While Yara is still full of puppy energy combined with being in yet another new place. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. But after a few days they seemed to be all right with each other. They even slept together a few nights on the same dog bed! And despite being very much out of shape, Dolly got quite rambunctious a few times — once they got so excited and crazy they crashed a chair into one of the fish tanks in the living room and caused a rush of water to slosh out the back!
The biggest thing I noticed was they were both extremely jealous of one another. If one girl had a toy, the other would steal it. If one girl was being paid attention to by one of us, the other would shove her way in to get petted, too. Yara was especially annoying with her lack of rear-end coordination — she kept slapping everyone with her tail, including Dolly! The absolute funniest thing had to be the slight identity crisis that kept going on with them. Everytime I’d call one dog, the other would charge up to me. Or if I gave one girl a command, the other would listen to me. Though, there were a few times both girls would promptly “sit” or “down.” Usually when I was trying to get one dog to come and the other to “stay.” It was very amusing and only a little annoying.
While I was at Dad’s, I did notice that Yara had somehow ripped a pad near her wrist. Of course I discovered this the Saturday before Christmas and had to ability to call my vet! There was a good chunk of dried pad hanging off that I think she’d been chewing on. She didn’t seem bothered by it and as it wasn’t on her paw I didn’t think it was a huge deal. Keith looked at it and said it appeared to already be healing up and wasn’t red or oozing anything. I have absolutely no idea when or how she ripped the pad, but a few days later she gnawed off the excess bit hanging off.
Since we’ve been back home, things have been pretty mundane. We’re finally working with a pretty regular routine now and Yara seems to be adjusting fairly well. She was a bit off color about a week ago and she got sick in the middle of Walmart much to my embarrassment, but otherwise we haven’t had much issue. The weather has been horrible for outside traveling, though, so we haven’t had much chance to do curb work which is annoying. Megan called last week to check up on us and I made a point to note that as we’re due for a home evaluation at some point. Hopefully we’ll be able to find somewhere decent to work whenever Fidelco comes to see us.
I’ve got many a cute photo of the girl, but for now I tease you with this because it makes me laugh:
And on a completely different topic, in the last few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of comment spam here on the site. If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up, it probably isn’t an error, but rather it got dropped into moderation. Don’t worry, I’ll see it no matter what, so please don’t try and resubmit. :)
1. Instead of the normal place cards, everyone was given a little program that detailed the events of the ceremony.