Last night was a short night of sleep following our late arrival home from class. Jedi was wound up tight until about 11:30. I'm not much different from him in that respect and we didn't go to bed until after midnight. Our 6:00 alarm came much too early (for me, not for Jedi). For breakfast this morning we worked on the hold behavior downstairs and Jedi did great. We did all the fun stuff in our post breakfast play. I had to go into work and got home around 1:00 today. There was a leash sitting on the table, so I decided to take Jedi into the bedroom and see where he was at in holding the leash. Not surprisingly, he's pretty much exactly where he is with the toy. The other dogs were milling about the bedroom and getting in the way, so Jedi had to work through their distraction.
It was another hot day, so we didn't do anything outside here at home aside from cleaning up the yard. For our outing of the day I opted to load up Jedi and Secret to hit the boat dock at Lake Neshonoc. We know that Jedi will jump into a pool, so I figured it was time to introduce him to jumping into natural water -- lest we have the reverse of Secret's problem where she would always jump into natural water but not pools! We got to the park probably around 5:15 or so and I was surprised at how dead it was. I was happy to see that there was nobody fishing or doing anything else that we would otherwise disrupt by leaping off the dock. Heck, there was only one boat trailer parked up top when we arrived.
I chucked Jedi's bumper off the side of the dock not terribly far off shore. He stared at it. He whined a little, but he didn't leave the dock. I ended up having Secret go in and get Jedi's toy, then I threw the other bumper in closer to shore, at a point where the water wasn't very deep. He jumped then, and from there on he was fine. I second-guessed my decision to jump here a few times just based on the absolutely horrible form that both dogs had going off this slippery dock. It certainly doesn't do them any favors when it comes to trying to build distance, but at least it gave Jedi the experience of jumping in a new place.
We had a minor catastrophe at one point when Jedi became a toy hog and grabbed Secret's bumper after he had already grabbed his own. After many circles of trying to take both of them he finally settled on Secret's big green bumper and abandoned his baby orange bumper way out yonder. After much begging and pleading, Secret appeased me and brought Jedi's bumper back with her. She wasn't pleased about this, though, and when she got back up to the dock she spit it out. Before I could grab it the bumper went under the dock. And then it was gone. I was on my hands and knees in the water trying to peer under the dock and I couldn't see it anywhere. I continued to throw the big bumper for Jedi while I searched, which displeased Secret greatly. By some absolute freaking miracle some awesome dude came swimming across the lake and stopped at our dock for a breather. I asked him if by chance he could see a bright orange toy from his vantage point and boom, about five feet away from him, there it was! He saved the day!
Jedi did well at coming out of the water today IF Secret was also coming out of the water. If Secret was still in the water he really didn't see much need to come out. When he did come out, though, he was a good boy and jumped up onto the dock all on his own and brought his toy with him. He misjudged a few times and tried to jump from too far out. Oops, didn't quite make it. In general, though, he's pretty talented at jumping out of water onto the dock. As usual, Jedi was none too pleased when it came time to leave. I figure we were probably there for about 45 minutes (we left at 6:00), which I think is more than enough (more than I ever used to do, at least). They got in a lot of swimming -- In addition to the jumps off the end of the dock, which meant a pretty long swim back to shore, they also got in some tosses from shore for some out and back swims.
We walked around long enough for the dogs to have a chance to shake off and go potty, Jedi straining at his leash the entire time trying to go back down to the lake. He crashed on the drive home, though, so I'd say he got in enough swim time. Once home Jedi got dinner out of a bowl tonight because I had class starting at 7:00. He continues to find it very entertaining to bring the stemmy weeds that I pulled outside through the dog door and into the house to chew on, and I continue to get up and throw them back outside. Jedi thinks this is a fun game (Secret has done the same thing; something about those weeds).
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