Day 29 - Mother's Day Get-Together (12 weeks old!)

Jedi is 12 weeks old today! Time is moving so quickly and Jedi is growing up so fast. I'm definitely noticing the size increase every time I pick him up for something these days. I think it's safe to say that he's doubled in size since he came home.

His busy, busy day yesterday came in handy by allowing us to sleep in this morning. Jedi started to stir a bit around 5:00 a.m., so I got up and let him outside. We went straight back to bed where we stayed until 8:30! Jedi was still out cold, but I figured we should get up and get moving.

At our breakfast training session today I introduced a metal spoon. The eventual goal is for Jedi to pick up the spoon (or any object) and deposit it into the bowl (or any other target object). For his first session I thought he did amazingly well. Secret always struggled with the concept of picking stuff up (she just wanted to touch it), so I didn't know what to expect with Jedi -- especially because he, too, is really good at paw touches. He seemed to immediately know what he was supposed to do and we moved pretty quickly into picking up the spoon. The only real issue we had was when he just tried to gnaw on it instead of pick it up. It didn't help, either, that he was still pretty sleepy and wanted to do the entire session laying down. We had a lot more success when he stood up, so I just kept throwing his food away from us to get him back up.

Once he had figured out the picking up part I moved the bowl in front of me, just in case he managed to carry the spoon any distance. Several times he got it close enough for the spoon to clang against the metal dish (no issue with the sound, so that's good) and he was rewarded handsomely for his efforts. I think we pretty much spent our entire session on this trick, though we did work through the other stuff with the toy when we were done (I don't know if I've updated how well he is working for his toys these days!)

We had a pretty lazy day around the house. Between a couple of play sessions outside, we got in lots of napping. I've opened up the puppy pen and surprisingly Jedi often chooses to go lay in the crate (with absolutely no bedding in it) vs the cushy dog bed next to it, the couch, or even the floor at my feet. I'm glad he likes his crate, I guess. I hope to get some of the nice crate mats from the vendor in MN soon.

Jedi's outing of the day was up to my parent's house for Mother's Day dinner with the family -- Not a new location, but lots of new people! Today Jedi got to meet my grandparents, my aunt & uncle, and their kids. I just took Luke along, so we had a total of four dogs.

Someone appears to be hitting the selective hearing stage already. There were a few times when we were outside that I had to go retrieve him because when I called him he decided to continue exploring in the opposite direction. The long line might start to see more use in the coming weeks.

It didn't take long before Jedi discovered the dog door at my parent's house. They have a small (terrier-sized) door and it weighs a lot less than ours at home, so it was pretty easy for him to go in and out once he figured that out. Their dog door leads out to a raised deck and there isn't much of anywhere he can go out there, so he didn't spend too much time outside.

He got in a lot more playtime with Lexie and Wes this time, probably because Kaiser and Kizzy weren't there. The surprise of the evening was when Jedi started humping on Lexie. Well, that's new. That's the first time he's done that to another dog (probably because it would never fly for him to do it to any of mine). We'll have to watch for that when Lexie and Wes stay here in a couple of weeks. Kizzy will probably be too busy doing it for Jedi to get a chance...

Once everyone left I got my parents to help me tackle Jedi's ears again. I don't know if I'll end up bracing or not, but I figured I could at least get the hair out of the way to stop weighing things down. I had shaved a bit of fuzz out of the inside of the ears the first week I had him, but all of that has grown back and more, so there was a lot of hair to shave out. We distracted him with a spoonful of peanut butter and surprisingly he was amazingly good and didn't struggle against it at all.

I used a little battery-operated trimmer and just shaved the hair out of the inside of the ear and took off the excess around the edges. When I saw how bad the hack job looked in pictures I decided more needed to come off. I plugged in my dad's bigger clippers and we went for round two -- This time I took off EVERYTHING and shaved the backs of his ears down to the leather.

He looks positively dorky, but I tell you, those ears are standing higher now. The right one will stand so tall at times that it doesn't really even have a tip. The left one is still floppy, but less so than it was. It will be interesting to see what they do over the next few days with the excess hair gone. There was a LOT of hair on the floor when we were done the first time, and probably an equal amount the second time. It was also interesting to note that his ears looked a lot bigger without any hair on them!

We did our dinner training session outside again. This afternoon I propped up the teeter with a traffic cone so that the plank is raised about 2" off the ground. Our mission is more or less the bang game. Jedi is trying hard, but you can tell he's ooged out about the whole thing. We'll be doing lots of this in the coming weeks, I think. We've also started adding a bit of speed to his bottom on the dog walk (hopping on from the side) and I think he's catching on, although he often overshoots and has to back up to grab the plank with his hind feet.

After dinner our play session was to run around a cone for his toy. I started this several days ago with a stick in the ground weave pole, but I moved to the traffic cone yesterday and I think the bigger target is helping. Jedi has a really good clockwise send now (the first direction we started with) and the counter-clockwise send is getting there. He often tries to dive behind me in that direction, so we either do less of a send and/or I continue to direct him with a collar hold. He's catching on. I would like for him to have a good send around the cone so that we can do more running recall work that will give me a chance to get ahead.

Following dinner we had another dramatic session of "Who gets the puppy?" Obviously if Secret wants him, she gets him, and this upsets Kizzy to no end. I noticed Kizzy playing a little with Kaiser today, so I'm hopeful the tides will soon shift and Kizzy will stop obsessing over Jedi --- or that Secret will learn to share, but I'm doubtful that will ever happen.