My high horse is cut off at the knees

Been feeling pretty crap, hence the break in the blogging. Still ploinking away at teaching the dogs stuff, when the kidlet affords me the chance! Sometimes he helps though. I get him to hold a target wand for me in the highchair which the dogs think is easy work, he's discovered he can get them to come by dangling a bit of food over the edge of the high-chair and keen on my clicker as you can see. Mostly I let him click and chuck cookies at the dogs, they think Laurent is the neatest thing EVER and are supremely convinced they may starve without him. *snort*

Laurent is 8 months and MOBILE... crawling, commando-crawling and pulling himself up on stuff all in one week. Eeep! Isn't that supposed to happen in STAGES?!?! He's got a bug of some sort though, is teething up a storm and is going through a develomental bit of seperation anxiety so he's extra cuddly at the moment. We checked out a Freestyle place a couple weeks ago and are going to give that a go mid-Julyish. Still waiting to get into Croyden. :-/

Agreed to try and help someone I know through one of my MG's with their dog. I went and met the dog a few weeks back as well and he's a really super cool dog and seems like a lot of fun to work with, plus his owner is already very AP in her mothering so she's already in agreement with half of is likely to work with him to start with! I'm really super jazzed about the whole thing!!!

A couple newish pics are here. No real story behind them, just cute.


A couple of stories:

Our routine for going outside is for the dogs to ask by sitting next to me and touching my hand with their noses, then I say "okay, let's go" and they run to the door, ploink into an automatic sit to wait for me to open the door and give permission to go through the door. Sierra (my Aussie) knows perfectly well how to open the door and let herself and Cade out but never does unless she asks for and recieves permission first or I cue it. So the normal sequence has been they ask for permission, they recieve it which cues them to go to the door and sit which cues me to open it and then release them and tell them either to go play or potty depending on which I want them to do. The door stays open until they come back in.

Now... our home also has a dog door from the previous dog, something my dogs had never used before. With a newborn keeping my hands (literally) full, I introduced the dogs to it. They were quite chuffed. "Oh! Look mum has put an agility obstical in the house! What fun!" They got it quite quickly of course but still ask permission before going out. Good dogs. Weird but good! But what really amused me is what they figured out when they wanted to come back in. The dog door doesn't stay open unlike the screen door so they have to request to come back in. (Or at least they think so since that's just how you make doors open as far as they know.) But Sierra can't exactly touch my hand from the outside! Her solution? She sticks her nose just inside the door-frame as close to my hand as she can get without actually entering the door and sits this way until I notice and say okay. I thought it was really quite clever and spent an inordinate amount of time chuckling at their inventiveness!

Another funny story... my dogs are not allowed in the kitchen when people are there. This rule happened after I was chopping stuff up and got bounced off of when Cade ran into the kitchen while playing leaving me with a big cut. I don't care about the rest of the time but no dogs in the kitchen with people. As it happens DH spilled a bunch of rice and rather than clean it up decided to have the dogs do so. Now my dogs are greedy little gluttons who'd sell their souls for a cherrio so he couldn't figure out why they wouldn't come in despite his ample coaxing. Cade eventually, after about five minutes, guiltily creeped into the kitchen but looked mighty uncomfortable with the whole thing. Sierra was DYING to get the rice but wouldn't budge past the entry, whining pitifully. My husband is absolutely perplexed by this point. What on earth was wrong with these dogs?!? I was about to fall down laughing... and asked him to come out of the kitchen. The second he did, they flooded in and started inhailing their feast. ROTFLMAO!

Okay you know the whole asking for permission thing? Useful but at times not so great. At one point I stumbled into the back area to go to the bathroom and Si asked to go out. I shrugged from my half-asleep state, gave her the go-ahead and shortly thereafter returned to bed still mostly asleep. The next morning I found the poor dog with her chin in the "may I come in?" position sleeping on the deck waiting veerryy patiently as I noticed I was a dog short in the bounce-bounce-happy-dog-greetings of the morning. Can you all say GUILT TRIP?!??!???!

Last night Si was a bit of a pill and Cade, who is normally Satan's right hand minion (even if his duties are largely ceremonial) was behaving abnormally well. Laurent has figured out he can coax the dogs over if he dangles a bit of whatever he's eating over the edge of his highchair. A.) They target to fingers and B.) they're gluttons. Normally that's not an issue, I don't give him anything that would be dangerous for dogs to eat anyhow so if he wants to chuck his food to the dogs that's his issue. Well now we have these fairly expensive organic dairy-free baby breadish thingies that cost slightly more than their weight in gold so I wasn't so keen on the dogs getting fed these things. Especially since Laurent actually really likes them. Nope, he was intent on getting Sierra and Cade over there and was dangling it over the high-chair. The dogs saw me shake my head and stayed put. Laurent was quite frusterated, the dogs ALWAYS come when he dangles food! He resorted to chucking it to the ground. Ha... no dice bubs, I picked it back up and put it on his tray. He gummed on it for a bit and then when I'd figured it was safe to move he chucked it again! Quick as a wink, Sierra darts over and snatches it just as I say, "Si leave it!" I cna see the gears in her mind work, oh HECK no... it's in her mouth, too late, she doesn't want to disobey but doesn't want to let go so she dashes off and I figure too late now and just tlel her to go outside. She does, crunching her thieved cracker all the way. I left and had my own dinner, bubs had to be tended to, fed, rocked down, getting ready for bed etc. Uh oh. Eleven fifty and I'm missing a dog. S###!!!! As I go over to the back of the house I can hear a rather pathetic sigh and notice a red butterfly nose sticking in the dog door. "Si you silly red dog, get your butt in here!" "OH YAY!!!! MUM!!! I love you SO much, thank you for saying I could come in!!! See what a really good girl I am?!?!?" *SIGH* I really, really, really need to remember she WILL stay out there and IS an obedient dog!!!

So now the question is begged: if I can train THIS, why the frell do I find it so bleeping hard to get a proper obed HEEL?!?!?