11 Months!

We made it! I know he’s not quite a year old, but we’ve made it past the limbo of those teenage months. A year old is not even close to ‘grown’, but the brain and body are showing what he will be once he finishes growing. I really am so enormously pleased that I ended up with Asher, he is such a wonderful dog and a lovely addition to our household. Being an instructor I see a lot of puppies, and some puppies are just hard. Hard on the handler, hard on the other dogs in the household, hard to connect with, hard to live with, hard to train. Quite frankly, I lucked out – Asher is just a joy and that has nothing to do with anything I did, some puppies are just easier than others, and he’s easy.

The issues he’s had are just typical puppy stuff (dogs are now totally barricaded from my backyard so I can fix all the damage Asher has caused …), but even then, it’s just been normal puppy stuff. There was the early puppy drama with Navarre that I still don’t understand, but obviously isn’t an issue anymore! Everyone gets along with and seems to enjoy Asher to some extent (Haku thinks all other dogs are extraneous, but hey). I love having four dogs, it just seems ‘right’. I look back at all my pictures of just the three dogs and they seem empty and lonely. And maybe it was just still feeling that loss from the divorce when I had to leave the other dogs behind (and losing London), but I just felt like there was someone missing, and now it feels complete.

That said, four dogs is definitely a lot of dogs, especially as they are all still very active and need a lot of mental stimulation. They keep me busy and I do often wish Asher was SMALLER. I have this TINY little toilet closet thing and it’s ridiculous when they all try to cram in with me, there just isn’t room. I would love to get Asher a farm so he can stretch out more, especially since we lost our big field for big runs, but it doesn’t look like it’s in the cards, so we will make do. It helps that we have more light to get the dogs out now. Asher has grown up to be a pretty good citizen, but he’s still a teenager. We are struggling with him pushing some boundaries at the moment, but Navarre continues to be the dog that pushes the most!

Asher is just a sweet, smart, fun, biddable, good-natured boy. He can even sometimes look handsome and not dorky, which I think will continue to improve. I was editing some agility video from this week and, wow, with that wide angle lens when you don’t really see the details, he looks so much like Navarre when he’s doing agility. I think he’ll be about the same size as Navarre, maybe a little heavier once he really grows a chest. Not going to be the most bendable thing, but he does seem to have a slightly better turning radius than Navarre (which, uh, is not saying much). Where he differs from Navarre at the moment is he has a lot more acceleration. Navarre has never seen a great deal of, um, urgency with agility – hence the drifting. He knows where we’re going, but he doesn’t feel the need to dig in and get there. At this point Asher seems better with that, but he’s just a baby.

So one more month before the big first birthday, still very much enjoying my Big Red Dog. This week we played around with some more pinwheel sequencing and he did pretty darn good with that – he likes to really open up and go – wheee! He’s so good with his rear crosses now, and his tunnel threadles continue to improve. We attempted to introduce the idea of a serpentine, which he’s not a natural, let me say. But we just broke it down and worked on him getting the idea of commitment in the face of my opposite motion. All trained with a toy this week, he took out a few jumps, but he would fix it the next time. Such a good boy!

What we didn’t work on was his RC homework. Partly because she’s like, ‘you need to secure the target so it doesn’t move’ and I have no ideas about how to make that happen. It doesn’t move a lot, and he doesn’t mind, so I’m not real worried about it. The homework does need an arena type area to work on it though, and we were having fun playing with pinwheels, so we’ll catch up next week. Once again, still not sold on the target mat as how I want to actually train the RC, so I’m not super motivated.

We are also still auditing Justine’s flatwork class, and we do some of the exercises, but not all. With Asher being so big and awkward I just want him to open up and learn forward. We will look at specialty skills later. I have no grand ambitions with him other than to have a good time, and we’re very much having a good time looking at more straightforward stuff for now.

What I did find most amusing when I edited his videos from practice this week is what Asher was doing when it WASN’T his turn, which was most definitely not staying on the table where he was supposed to. He was all over the place, though I’ll give him credit, he has learned to wait his turn, even if he’s not waiting where he’s SUPPOSED to. I will have to be much more vigilant in making sure he’s actually on the table next time we practice …

Did also work on some beginning jumping exercises. Added a little height to a jump with a one jump set point exercise, which was fine until we tried 18 inches and he went under the bar. Goober. Did some bending grid exercises and he did really well with those, and some low collection grid stuff, which he did pretty well with. I don’t see anything too concerning with his jumping, though he’s certainly not as thoughtful as his sister! He is way more thoughtful about it then he used to be though. Won’t be doing any height with his sequencing for quite some time, but he will continue to look at some low impact one jump work as he grows.

In the meantime, mostly just watching a world gone crazy – the pandemic continues to be the most frightening because of the unknown. Things went from going really quiet, to pandemonium by the end of last week. Now it’s just waiting to see how bad things get. So basically life is on a day to day basis at the moment. This is going to be a new way of life for quite some time.

I will say that with everyone home from work you go to the park now and it’s like a circus – people are NOT staying away from one another at the park, I’ll tell you that! And I have first hand knowledge as the dogs now have their own personal fan club of small children that flock to us when we arrive. It has been growing for a while, but now when we show up it’s a herd of small children that want to throw the aerobee badly for them. And I let them, it is incredibly cute to see the dogs being so very gentle and careful with the kids. Why aren’t they that gentle with me? And some of these kids are TINY, like, barely walking tiny. And the dogs are so good with them, and bring them the frisbee and patiently wait while the kid just throws the frisbee to the ground, pretty much (I’m not giving frisbee throwing lessons here).

Of course, while the boys just love it, Bright is absolutely horrified at this development. And she’s so conflicted what to do, as she’d like to just leave, but then she doesn’t actually want to leave, so she’ll hover at a distance. Then she’ll come in and jump up on my back and stalk the action from that position for a while, then comes and sets up in between my legs for a while. Then she’ll very sneakily check out the kids while they’re backs are turned, then start the whole process again. I’m hopeful she’ll eventually just play, but it is a lot of children, and a little much for her. The good news is that the kids aren’t really interested in touching the dogs, and seem horrified at the concept of the dogs touching them, so Bright has that going for her.

So, yeah, a lot more children in my life these days, which is, uh, unexpected. There is one parent of some of the kids that comes and makes sure they’re supervised, but the kids are actually really well behaved, shockingly. And they watch out for the little ones and make sure everyone gets a turn, it’s pretty sweet, as kid stuff goes. But, yeah, not really ‘social distancing’ in my town, apparently. As they aren’t touching the dogs and not really coming near me, it’s easy enough for me to sanitize the frisbee afterwards, so while I don’t think it’s super wise to have all those children together, I’m not too worried for me, anyway.

Dogs are still really struggling with the slightly warmer temperatures, Asher and Navarre especially (who, admittedly, are running around more). So trying to make sure we keep it short and sweet with the exercising at the moment, not looking forward to summer AT ALL. Just seems like some years it takes a lot longer for dogs to acclimate to warmer temps, and for some reason this year they seem to be particularly sensitive to any added temps. Though we did get to go hiking in the snow, which was unexpected as it was beautiful! We even got some on the ground here in Hubbard, which was pretty. Spring keeps it interesting …