Day 44 - Class night

This morning Jedi had one of his cranky-pants moments during his breakfast training session. I'm going to attribute it to him being overly tired, but he threw one of his "don't wanna, don't hafta" fits. All I wanted him to do was give me a frog stretch -- which, I'll admit, I haven't been maintaining/asking him to do with any frequency -- but still. He would lay down when asked, then immediately offer a roll over. Over, and over, and over. And when that didn't net the response he wanted he would get up and go over to offer 4-in in the metal baking dish (my training room is still piled with stuff). If that didn't work he'd start to offer any behavior he could think of. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he offered the slightest stretch in his hind legs while he was down. Once I clicked that he was like, "Oh, that's what you want?" Then he was fine. We progressed to putting objects other than the spoon into the bowl. Jedi had no problem generalizing this for either the little plastic lid or the lid's container.

Jedi (and Secret, who snuck out the door) rode with this morning to drop Wes & Lexie off at the boarding facility where they will be staying this week. I told them it wasn't going to be an exciting ride, but they insisted on coming. It was probably good to take Jedi somewhere that he didn't get to come out and do something fun. He's getting sassier than ever about expecting to get out of the van and have a party when we stop.

When we got home we proceeded to have the quietest day since Jedi's arrival. All five dogs were completely exhausted from "entertaining" our visitors for the weekend. I kind of feel bad for Wes & Lexie, knowing that they are probably just as beat and they were getting tossed into daycare where they were probably going to go nuts all day. Oh well, they'll sleep well tonight.

Nobody in my house moved until I got up to work Jedi through his lunch at 12:30. It was another warm day, so I elected to go down to the basement for our training session. We did some pivots to the leg and then spent some time backing up the stairs. Jedi is getting faster at this skill and can do three stairs pretty quickly. We finished by putting more stuff in the big bowl. When I only had enough of his food left that I could fit it in one hand I offered him the empty bowl and asked him to put it into the bigger one. I'm assuming it's because he's not allowed to touch the dish when there is food in it, but he wanted nothing to do with picking up the smaller food bowl.

We went outside to play ball after lunch to help ensure a quiet afternoon filled with sleeping before class tonight (hey, one can always hope). I dumped out and refilled the pools when we were done because everyone was hot and I figured it would be appreciated. Jedi was a loon.

He must have gotten his ya-yas out at lunch because we did have another quiet afternoon. Never fear, though -- all of that sleeping recharged his batteries and he was ready to go a million miles per hour for class tonight. I had to give Jedi several timeouts during playtime because he is being an absolute bully to Massey, the puppy of similar size and age to him. Granted, most of it is just vocalization and the other puppy keeps coming back for more, but Jedi is getting too aroused with that particular puppy and needs to be redirected. The good thing is that he will always redirect to toys, and if I can get him to pay attention to the other puppies he will play with them.

In our puppy class tonight we spent a bit of time talking about grooming and Jedi was a good demo dogs while we talked about nails (I didn't trim any of his since we just did it on Friday). We also talked about the first steps of stay/wait and he did a good job with that as well, although he was a bit sassy when I was talking to the class and not paying attention to him. As usual, Jedi loved the restrained recall portion of class, but he did lose his mind a bit when a student borrowed his favorite tail toy for their own recall. We finished class by pulling out the puppy obstacles (little bridge, little teeter, etc.). I kept Jedi off of everything to let the students play, but after class was done I let him explore everything. No surprise, he had no problem with any of it and offered a nice bottom on both the bridge and the teeter.

Jedi was a rock star during the adult dog class. We packed everyone up and went for a walk down to Vet's Park to let them work around different distractions and in a big open area. Jedi got to serve as a distraction during stays and also got to play the part of a trained dog during meet and greets.  :o)  I kept hot dogs in his face to make sure he didn't jump on anyone, but he was actually showing amazing restraint all on his own. When we got back to the building I put Jedi in a crate for the remainder of class. He was so tired by this point that he just crashed and didn't make a peep for the rest of the night.

Of course, that all goes out the window as soon as we get home and he can start going nuts playing with Kizzy. Speaking of Kizzy, I just witnessed proof at how much Jedi has grown -- Kizzy can't really hump on him anymore!  lol....