A Seminar!

Poor Asher, as soon as things got back to normal after Bryn’s season … Haven goes into season. It’s hard being a boy. It’s also hard because, unlike Bryn, Haven is quite the flirt – so I have to protect her from the molesting boys (Bryn is VERY clear to keep away!). So we’ll see if there are any changes with Haven after her first season. Theoretically I plan to spay her when she’s around 2 and finished growing. The only thing holding me back is fear of spay coat (as Haven is surprisingly fluffy), and spay incontinence (such a nightmare!). Still got another year to see how things go though.

Yes, Haven is getting closer to her birthday! It’s been such a fun first year, some puppies are just more fun than others – and Haven has been a blast. Zero regrets about adding her to the household, she’s just been a gem that makes me smile every day. The other dogs agree, though she does occasionally chase a cat, so maybe the cats aren’t always on board with Team Haven.

Miss B. Haven went to her first sequencing seminar! When I signed up I was like, “Well, she’ll be 10 months by then, I’ll probably have done some sequencing with her at that point.” Well, I was wrong. We did a little crash course the week before, and I’m always amazed how all the foundation pieces do make it so easy to put it all together. However, at the seminar the courses were all giant extension lines, which we really have not done. She was game though, and got more confident with the agility as we went on. A little distracted occasionally by smells in the arena, but happy to play and having a great time. A good experience for the baby.

What we worked on at the seminar was putting some Jenny Damm moves into play. I have been following her online stuff, but hadn’t really put any of it to work with my own dogs. She’s a very analytical and organized trainer, but I wasn’t sold on it for every dog. Turns out, signaling things earlier and supporting your dog more are never bad things to do – go figure. Definitely a different way to of handling than I’m used to, but I’ll admit it did make a huge difference with Bryn to a ridiculous degree. Turns out Bryn really wants the personal touch, when I was super connected to her, she was connected to me. Go figure. Harder to say whether it was all helpful for Haven, but there is nothing that she does that is going to be harmful – baby dogs need the MOST help.

So seeing the handling changes in a real life situation with multiple different types of dogs was very helpful. I will be making changes to my handling to help support both my older and baby dogs. Fun to play around with something new. And we moved the seminar to my place so Bryn got to play and she had a blast – god I love that little thing. But, yeah, she can’t work at Barb’s with the sheep right next to the arena …

And shortly after that, Bryn started getting all sensitive with her post-heat hormones – piff. She’s not terrible about it all, but it’s definitely noticeable as she’s not her perky self. I thought about entering her in some AKC, but turns out it’s all judges I won’t show under – and then I thought about the UKI trial, but with her being sensitive … well. Yeah, I am looking again into sending her out to Robin Brown so she can have a herding vacation this spring/summer. It would be a good time for it, and Nancy is heading out there anyway. I THINK she would really enjoy that, and Robin has worked with her before and they didn’t butt heads like Bryn can do with some people. I wouldn’t have any grand expectations that she would come back with a ton of new skills, but I think she would enjoy the adventure – sheep are her very favorite thing in the world and I do want to continue to give her opportunities, even if I don’t have any ambitions for herding at the moment. And maybe she WOULD get some skills … I wouldn’t complain about that. We shall see, communicating with herding folks is … difficult.

In the meantime, still looking into getting ASCA trials at the arena, though it wouldn’t be until September at this point. Nothing is certain, but it’s looking more concrete. I think Asher would really like that, so that gives us something to look forward to. He is still really fun to work with, even if we don’t have any agility goals right now, with UKI not being appropriate for his jumping and AKC being a bad choice with the lack of spacing for my big boy. He still loves agility the best.

Mainly focused on the puppy right now, as she’s getting older and we can start looking at more things. Haven remains pretty easy, more sensitive than a BC, but I’d expect that. As always, she likes things super clear and fun, and if she’s not getting that, she’ll find it elsewhere. Which I think is a pretty reasonable response. We did put her teeter into some sequences, and she was upset about that for a bit as I really haven’t actually trained the WHOLE teeter, it was just her getting on it and offering it all the time. Actually asking her to do it when cued kind of freaked her out at first, but she got on board quickly. Also getting ready to start some serious dogwalk training, and not that we’ve really done anything but downramps, but her aframe when offered looks really nice – knock on wood. I suppose I should ACTUALLY train it at some point though …

Trick-wise we’ve been stuck on skipping for quite a while. She WILL skip when she’s right in front of me and I’m backing up, and it’s freakin adorable – but I can’t get it when she’s farther away from me. So we’ve been trying to isolate the issue, working on tricks at a distance in general and putting individual verbal cues on each front leg lift and trying to clean it up. I can get LIMPING from a distance, but getting the leg switches has just not clicked yet.

But, yeah, Haven is almost a year and she’s almost never had her meals out of a bowl, we’ve trained every night since she arrived. Admittedly, sometimes it’s just asking for one thing and then just a big jackpot, but we really enjoy our nightly ritual. I do this with all puppies for a while, but usually start tapering off by now – she just enjoys it so much!

Asher had some minor plastic surgery recently. He had a little tiny growth on his eyelid for months, and it didn’t seem to bother him or get any bigger, but more recently it looked like the white of his eye was getting irritated. So expensive surgery to snip that off, but I had his teeth done at the same time (he didn’t really need it, but hey). It was his first ever surgery, so I’m glad it went smoothly. They said he was so quiet they almost forgot he was there – good boy.

Now, NAVARRE, on the other hand, got fired from the grooming salon because he would NOT shut up. He gets all worked up about the force dryer and apparently was just barking continuously when he heard it. So no more groomer for Navarre, which I don’t think he’ll be super sad about, but he IS my fluffiest dog, darn it. Such a troublemaker. Haven also had her first grooming recently, she did great, and did NOT bark her fool head off the whole time (and was so pretty when she got back!).

Haku is doing GREAT on his Librela, it’s given him a whole new lease on life – so great to see him RUNNING and playing again. That shit is magical, I would never have guessed he could go back to looking so good. Now, admittedly the last few days he’s been limping, but I think he just gets over excited now and probably fell somewhere. Hopefully he’ll be better soon!

Weather is getting warmer, days are getting longer, we’re all enjoying spring. Now that everyone is finally out of season around here, we are hiking again and no longer having to rotate everyone around. Good to be back!