17 Weeks

Nearly 18 weeks, really.

Not so many tricks these past 2 weeks, mostly house manners and walk manners and visiting manners. I finally knuckled down and started working properly on REA, I’ve been a bit wary as I haven’t shaped it before and I was struggling to mark the right things. Thought about it without Rio, and then attempted to put the plan into action. It took us four sessions to get a rear foot target on the box, but they were short sessions (30s – 5mins) over the course of the day. She was getting slightly frustrated by the third session, but I think that was partly because she had an idea of what I was clicking for but she couldn’t figure out how to get her legs to do that on purpose.

I do love me that girl attitude though, Kim and Rio get pissy and start huffing under their breath and frowning at me, but they keep pushing and pushing until they get what they want. Dylan just goes into repeat-cycle of offering everything he already knows. It’s such a slooooow process for him to problem solve.

Sit, paw, both-paws, down, dead, left, go-round are all on command, and so is “go to bed”. She knows Ready and Go, recall is pretty awesome, Leave-it is also pretty good.

Getting lots of exposure to new things as the Christmas stuff has gone up, routine has been disrupted a lot this week as people are coming and going a lot more than usual with shopping etc. Different visitors, parcels delivered, later nights. All going fine.

She has grown some serious legs this week too. She’s still hovering at around 16″, lots of growing left to do yet though.