Day 16 - Rockland Park

After two weeks of working from home I know I need to start going into the office again soon, but Mondays are slow and boring, so I figured it could wait until tomorrow. Unfortunately it's been pretty cold outside again, so outdoor meetings have been less than pleasant and we've been stuck indoors quite a bit. In other news, the next lesson was just posted for our Silvia Trkman puppy class, so I have some homework to get to! I stopped videoing once we had covered all of the topics from lesson 1, but we've continued to work through our 3x/day training sessions. I'm looking forward to sharing our next video, whenever I get it done.

I had a dinner meeting to attend tonight, so I needed to keep our outing fairly close to home. I decided to go to the other park in Rockland, the one with the old school house. It's a small park, but it has a nice big grassy area with a small ball field and some playground equipment. Today I took Jedi, Secret, and some tennis balls.

The last time we played with tennis balls at home Jedi was doing more chasing and chewing than chasing and bringing back, so I wanted to take advantage of the big open spaces to allow me to run away and get him to run back with the ball. From the get-go he did better with fetching today. He still stopped short a couple of times and when I ran away he followed, but without the ball. lol  We'll have to continue working on that. The good news is that he doesn't play keep-away or other silly games. He's all about getting the ball thrown again!

After everyone was properly hydrated I decided to take the dogs on a short walk around the block. Jedi hasn't really had the experience of a proper leash walk yet. Before his arrival I was pretty good about getting the dogs out for at least one walk a day, if not more. Because I feel bad about leaving him behind (because we always do 2+ miles) I have pretty much just abandoned our walks. It would be nice if we could start to work these back into our schedule -- Pretty sure all of my dogs would agree with that statement.

It was pretty much a non-event! Other than weaving back and forth like a drunken sailor and not knowing which side of me he wanted to be on everything went great. No pulling, straining, or any of the other bad behaviors we see in puppy class. The weaving is annoying, so we'll work on it, but right now I'm just letting him figure out this walking thing and that it's pretty cool.

All of their trips together must be helping Secret bond to Jedi. She continues to take more of a shine to him each day, although Kizzy still continues to butt in any time she senses they are doing something. I managed to take this video tonight (dark, so the lighting is cruddy) to show how well Secret is doing with Jedi. She's still a bit much for him on the ground, but at least he feels comfortable enough to interact with her from the couch now!