We are halfway there! To clarify, when I brought Jedi home I had a somewhat "soft" goal of giving him 100 new experiences over the first 100 days. It's one of those things you toss out there because it's a nice round number and it sounds good. Looking back at how much we've done over the last 50 days brings a new realization to how big of a number 100 is!! Thankfully the weather has blessed us and we only had that one day that rain chased us indoors to visit PetSmart -- Outdoor experiences are much easier to come by. It's a bit daunting to think that we're *only* halfway there.
Thankfully days/weekends like this one are "freebies" in that I don't have to put any thought or effort into planning our schedule. Agility trials are a most wonderful socialization opportunity for puppies, as they are filled with dog-savvy people and well-behaved dogs. I'm thankful for everyone who took the time to meet Jedi this weekend, and for the dogs he got to say hello to as well!We were up bright and early this morning. Jedi and I went outside to work for his breakfast. We did more pivots to the leg (from the small plate) and then we worked on our wait/stay behavior. Jedi is doing really well with this, using both food and toys. Better with food. :o)
Everyone did great on the trip to Rochester. I decided to bring Kizzy along today because, well, I enjoy running her. This definitely affected how much free time I had to devote to Jedi today, and the schedule also made it less convenient for him to be inside. As a result, and because the weather was quite lovely today, Jedi spent much of his day in the van with regular trips out to potty/play. He had a few opportunities to practice hanging out inside when I had bigger lulls between runs.
I had enough time to play with Jedi before the first class of the day, so I took him into the arena and we played with the hol-ee roller for a while. There was a barrel set up in the open space, so I decided to see what would happen if I asked Jedi for a send around it. So far I've only asked him to go around a large traffic cone, which I figured is different because he can see me the entire time. He went around the barrel the first time I asked him -- Wow! We continued to play with sends in both directions around the barrel and Jedi rocked it. Additionally, while he typically goes pretty wide around the traffic cones, he had nice tight turns around the barrel (obviously the barrel is bigger and that might be part of it). We probably got in about 10 minutes of running before I had to go walk my course.
One of the times that Jedi came in I had him sit next to me while I scribed the class. There was a solid partition between the scribe table and the ring, so I figured we were safe from him getting too over-stimulated about anything. Additionally, someone came and sat on the floor next to Jedi and kept him entertained throughout the class. She must not have been playing enough for his liking, so he started throwing behaviors at her like backing up onto things and waving at her. It's nice to see that he'll offer these things to other people!For lunch we did more leg pivots. Jedi is making progress at moving away from the target if he's not thinking about it. Every now and then he gets a bit stuck, though, and we have to go back to restart. We worked more stay/waits at the trial today, too, mostly with the toy.
Back at home, for dinner tonight I was looking for something quick and easy (because I'm exhausted) so we went out to play on the table. I thought we'd work on some table downs, but Jedi started offering the pee trick as he reached for the table, so we went with that.Other than that it's the usual insanity around here tonight. At first Kizzy wanted Jedi to leave her alone because she was tired. She's recovered, I guess, because she's been playing with him now. Secret jumps in now and then. I thought she would have been more active tonight since she was left home today. I've noticed that Secret has not been playing with Jedi as much lately -- Kizzy has been hogging him again.
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