Jedi was pretty full of himself this morning. He was up and at 'em bright and early, which I didn't really appreciate since a storm had rolled through around 2:00 a.m. and woke me up (but hey, at least the emergency sirens weren't sounded this time). I finally rolled out of bed around 6:30, much to Jedi's delight. We went downstairs for breakfast and spent another session working on Jedi's hold skill. He started offering the hold in a sit today! There's still some head flinging, but it's getting better. Once we worked through Jedi's food I spent a bit of time playing with him since he was so wound up and I knew he'd soon be going into the crate. We worked on turns around the cone, spins & twirls, waits, and downs.
I didn't get out of work until 2:00 due to a long meeting, so Jedi had another day where he was crated a bit longer than usual. So far he hasn't given me reason to feel bad about this, as even after being crated from 7:30 to 3:00 he is able to run outside, bark at me while I carry the bucket over to the water spigot, play with the hose, roll around, and then follow me back over to where the bucket lives until he feels it necessary to go potty. Hooray for growing bladders, I guess.
Because I got home around 3:00 and knew we'd be leaving at 5:30, I elected to not do anything with Jedi this afternoon. I also didn't feed him a lunch meal today, opting instead to throw double portions in his "to go" container for class tonight. I really should move Jedi to twice daily feedings and drop lunch one of these days. There seems to be so much value in having that third training session each day (or the fact that it lets me feed him one meal out of a dish without feeling guilty if I'm lazy). On class days where I expect him to get more food in the p.m. it makes sense to skip lunch right now. There was a bit of pressure put on me tonight to make sure we finished all of the food, though, since I fed all of the dogs before we left tonight and don't want to have to finish Jedi's dinner after we get home.
So, tonight was the first night of our second round of classes at Canine Sports Zone in Middleton. This class is Agility Foundations 2 and is a continuation of the last class we took. It runs from 7:30 - 8:30 which is convenient from the aspect that I can work my normal hours (I'm generally online until at least 5:00 when working at home) and even get some homework done before I have to leave. The challenging aspect is that I won't be getting home until 10:30 each week. Neither myself nor Jedi are very good about going to bed straight away when we get home, so I anticipate some late nights on Tuesdays for the next six weeks.
I'm not complaining, though. It is so worth it to see Jedi in his element at class. It is so beneficial to be able to devote my attention 100% to Jedi during this time. Doing so ensures that we don't see any of the negative or reactive behaviors I sometimes see creep in on the nights when I teach and am not able to focus on Jedi. In this class Jedi gives it his all from the moment we walk into the door until the moment we leave (and I pretty much have to make him get in the van because yes, the fun is done). I anticipate plenty of "working" time during this class session, as it's a small class of four students. The other three attendees were all in our Foundations 1 class, so it was nice to see everyone again tonight (we had 6 in that class, so we lost a couple or they went to another night).
Tonight was largely all recap from where we left off. Even though there were only four of us, we still split into two groups of two. I started with Jedi over on the "target" side. We moved around the various stations working on the plank, two-on/two-off, balance discs, boxes, etc. I was happily surprised that Jedi was still able to offer full pivots on the balance disc when prompted. I keep meaning to revisit this one at home to make sure he doesn't completely lose that skill. I'm pretty good about doing that -- teaching something and never returning to it again. After a bit I switched over to toy play and we worked on stay/release, where I started throwing some blind crosses at Jedi. We still had a little bit of time to kill (long rotations) so then we finished up this session by working on the paw pods, where Jedi was able to show off his skills of having all four feet on separate pods.
When we moved over to the other side we had a tunnel (straight), a chute, and a table. We worked on sending to the tunnel, staying in front of the tunnel, and then the same with the chute. After that we added the table after the tunnel. Jedi came in to that one with a bit too much impulsion, but he tried really hard to land in his down, so that was nice. After a couple of times of overshooting the table we did a couple of sends not out of the tunnel. Jedi is doing great with holding his down on the table while we play and I think this is a big help in the development of his auto-down.
The class came back together to do some restrained recalls for a bit, and then we ended up back over on the tunnel side. This time we connected chute, table, then tunnel. Jedi did well going from the chute to the table and started to catch on to the fact that he needed to collect himself a bit to not go sliding past. Thank goodness he's giving me a nice lead out, though, because I'm sure I wouldn't be getting him on the table so seamlessly without that. When we switched sides we had traffic cones to play with. Jedi still had some of his dinner left, so I opted to work nanana and check-check with his food. I'm pretty proud that Jedi was able to concentrate on this (to a point) while the other dogs were going through tunnels on the other side. As we neared the end of time, though, it was getting harder for him so I elected to put his leash back on and finish up with some target touches.The ride home in the dark made things pretty quiet, but Jedi has been running around like a mad man since we got home. Kizzy seems to be just as jazzed up as he is, so we'll see how successful we are at actually going to bed tonight. I've had to get up about 5 times now as I typed this post to throw the giant weed/plant/things back outside that Jedi keeps bringing in through the dog door. Oh, and once he brought in poop that was in the potty yard (as evidenced by the rocks stuck to it). That was special.
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