Jedi Goes to Daycare!

Jedi had a fun new experience today -- he went to doggy daycare for the first time! This is something I had in the back of my mind to include in Jedi's first 100 days, but I never really found a reason or need to send him. I also have attachment issues and don't like having other people take care of my dogs.  :o)  Today I had several meetings scheduled at work, with a couple of them in the afternoon being ones better attended in person. My 1-on-1 meeting with my boss first thing in the morning meant a full day in the office. Rather than just asking my dad to come let Jedi out midday, I figured we may as well go ahead and try that daycare thing.

I'll admit, I've never really been a big fan of daycare or group boarding scenarios. While I want all of my dogs to be okay around other dogs (like they would be in a trial), I can't say I care if they enjoy playing with other dogs or not. Jedi absolutely has what I call the "daycare personality," though, in that he really does love all dogs and he has that happy-go-lucky personality. I thought he'd have a lot more fun running around at Marcie's Pet Spa today versus spending ten hours in a crate. They do have a policy of not having intact animals over 6 months of age, but Jedi is so close to the cutoff that they allowed it. If we need to use the facility again I'll need to clear it through an owner. I don't worry about Jedi, but sometimes other dogs react poorly to the intact males.

I dropped Jedi off at 8:00 this morning. He is familiar with the location because this is where I teach classes (in the basement). I took him over to go potty in the grass area since that's our routine. He met a couple of dogs in the lobby and when they took him back he didn't even glance back at me. I'm friends with the facility's owners on Facebook and really appreciated it when one of them sent me a few videos around lunch time to let me know that Jedi was doing great. No surprise, he totally glommed on to a fluffy little Pomeranian and they hung out for most of the day. Pretty sure Jedi thinks that he, himself, is small and fluffy.

One of the things I love about this place is that they always share lots of pictures on their Facebook page every day. It's nice to see what your dog is up to each day when you leave them. I think my biggest surprise was that they caught evidence of Jedi resting! I honestly didn't expect that at all. When I dropped Jedi off this morning I asked that they not play fetch with him due to his propensity to hurt himself. I know how it is for employees in places like this -- playing with dogs is fun, so they love getting in dogs that will play. Well, Jedi will play. And play. And play some more. His sprained foot finally seems healed, so the last thing I wanted was for him to hurt something else (heck, he could do that just with his normal running around in that environment). Thankfully they were very receptive to this and the woman up front paged my request back to the workers right away.

My meetings were scheduled until 4:00, so I didn't think I'd be much later than 4:30 picking Jedi up. As it turned out, I didn't get out of the office until almost 5:00, so it was closer to 5:30 when I finally got there (even happier that he wasn't stuck at home in a crate). When they brought him out our reunion was about as much of a non-event as you can imagine. His initial reaction was more of a, "And you are....?" Then he jumped on me and was ready to leave. He crashed soon after we hit the road and wandered around the yard in a bit of a stooper while I picked up poo. Then we came inside where he crashed flat out on the floor for about an hour until I got up to feed the dogs. He had a really brief rebound after dinner (with about a quarter of the energy that he usually has) but then quickly crashed again. I have never seen Jedi this tired ever!

Jedi has been doing great with his training the last couple of days. The night before last I set up another configuration with the hoops to work on crosses and sending. Sometimes he locks into what he thinks is up next and there isn't much you can do to pull him off it, but hey, I appreciate the independence and the fact that he feels comfortable driving 30-40' away from me. We can work on steering over the next year before he's ready to compete.  :o)  Last night I set up a serpentine of 3 winged jumps with a tunnel at the end. I didn't follow my usual plan of gradually flattening the jumps and instead broke down individual elements. We didn't actually get to all three jumps because we had enough to work on with two. Big takeaways from the session were an improvement in Jedi's "jump" commitment when calling him through at an angle, and also that we need to work on understanding a "push" through something that isn't directly in front of us. It's much easier to run straight into the tunnel, don't you know! Nevertheless, Jedi had fun. He always does.

We're going to lay low the next couple of days in preparation for Jedi's big weekend of dock diving. There is rain forecast for Saturday. Fingers crossed that they are wrong, or that it won't be all day.