Day 19 - Downtown Sparta

Poor, poor Jedi. I have a couple of meetings on Thursdays that it's good to be present for, so I went back into the office today for a half day. Unlike my other forays into work, however, this time I elected not to ask my dad to stop by to let Jedi out. Because Jedi has been sleeping through the night for a bit, I thought I'd go ahead and see how he did if he was asked to go a bit longer during the day. So far he really hasn't had to go more than 2-3 hours. I ended up not getting home until 12:30, which meant that Jedi ended up going 5 hours (I left at 7:30). I felt bad that I pushed for such a jump in duration, but he was a champ and there were no accidents in the crate. Yay Jedi!

Unfortunately for both of us, we had another day of crappy rain. This made it a bit more difficult to come home to a puppy who had been in a crate for 5 hours and then expect to get any work done. I had a couple of meetings this afternoon to get through, so I gave Jedi a new "toy" to keep him occupied. It was a success, as this milk jug kept him occupied for well over a half hour!

I didn't want to go the pet store route two days in a row, and it was really only misting outside by 5:00, so I decided to do an outdoor outing tonight. I figured I'd put the new harness I picked up to the test -- while it fits, yes, it certainly does remind me why I hate "normal" harnesses so much. I can't wait until he gets big enough that I can order him a good one.

I decided to work on Jedi's leash-walking skills tonight and god help me, for some reason I decided to take both of the girls along. Considering we've never walked in town, you'd think maybe I would have started slowly. Alas, everyone in the house is going stir-crazy so I figured I'd get both of the girls out tonight. It didn't go too bad, really, it was just a lot of leashes to keep track of with a puppy who can't decide which side he wants to be on.

I drove downtown and parked by the courthouse (for those not familiar with Sparta, "downtown" is not big, we have a population around 9,500). Jedi unloaded himself right away, so we got that out of the way. After going a couple of blocks we swung up and hit the downtown strip. We walked the length of the shops, crossed the street and then walked back through downtown. There was quite a bit of vehicle traffic tonight, but not a lot of people out because of the rain. There were a few particularly loud trucks and Jedi never seemed to even notice any of the vehicle noises. Someone was nice enough to compliment the dogs' behavior, which is pretty impressive considering we had a 10-week old puppy in the bunch.

We went by the museum and I stopped and made everyone pose for pictures. Surprisingly, this went way better than I expected with Jedi (he's gotten a bit sassy about posing recently -- that first picture was a total accident, lol). Too bad Kizzy didn't feel like cooperating, but look at those border collies!

When we got back to the area where I'd left the van I figured Jedi still had some gas left in the tank, so we kept going and went down the next block, up another two, back behind the hospital, and then cut through to make our way back. In all we were out for about 40 minutes (albeit slow walking and some posing time in there), so that's pretty good!

During our breakfast training session Jedi had a major breakthrough with pivoting and finally did his first full circle! This inspired me to take the camera with me for his lunch and dinner training sessions, and tonight I put together his video for lesson 2 of his puppy class with Silvia Trkman. So far he's only doing full circles to the left, but he's offering more to the right and I'm sure he'll get there (let's face it, I honestly was starting to feel like he'd NEVER get a full circle in any direction, so it will come). We're starting to make real progress on the paw crossing as well, although there's still more sideways/circling than I'd like (I think he's following the hand with the food more than the target). Backing up is great and he has no problems with his 2-on/2-off behavior. I've also started to ask him for behaviors to earn his toy -- boy was that one hard at first, but it's getting better. He's also doing better with taking food around the toy. I have to be careful, though, because he'll spit it out if I'm not careful. We're having so much fun!

 
Finally, I'm just going to leave this picture here because I think it's adorable. I cropped the photo by the statue to include just Secret and Jedi, then placed it next to the picture Jedi's breeder took of him next to his dad. For real, have you ever seen anything cuter?! I love to see how much he's grown since then -- he was probably about four weeks in the picture with his dad? We'll have to try for similar poses as he gets bigger! Maybe some day we can even get him back with dad.