Can I Bring the Dog?

Thanks to our teacher, here we ate working on “send to mat.”

There’s a swale outside and it’s full of water this week. Bonney’s private wading pool.

Chico says, “No thanks. In fact, what she’s doing makes me a little nervous.”

Upping the game: “catch it.”

Finally sunny and warm, yesterday’s ten inches of snow melting fast, we had to get outside and get muddy.

Even Chico got in on the action. You might want to turn the volume down a bit before you listen to this, Bonster is pretty loud.

She loves this ball and we’re all so under-exercised right now that I spent a good fifteen minutes playing “football” with her and letting Chico run around in excitement. And we’ll probably do it a little bit more before the sun goes behind the trees.

In October of 2006, my family gathered to celebrate my mother’s 9th birthday.  My niece hadn’t had her annoying rescue for very long, but he made it into the photo album my thoughtful cousin Andrea made. 

Little did I know that ten years later that annoying beast would be my treasured heart-dog and I would be thrilled and tearful to find an image of him as a young guy.

We had a fun visit to Maggie’s back yard yesterday. Maggie and Bonney played with each other, and Chico got excited enough to play with me like we were a couple of dogs. He can run at me and punch me with two feet, play-bite at my arms and hands, dance to “I’m gonna get you!” – he can even roll around like two dogs playing bitey-face with me. Not with another dog, but with me, yes.

His eyes were shining, his tail was wagging, his mouth was half-open in a doggie smile. He ran and dodged.

Bon-bon did the same with Maggie.

And when we came home and had dinner, everyone canine was very relaxed:

This week I’m going to mail my first ever agility trial entry that doesn’t include any classes for Chico. It’s AKC and he has to jump sixteen inches there and I have not been asking him to do that lately. He likes practices better than trials (in fact, he jumps twelve inches fast and happy, with shining eyes and a happy tail, at Julie’s arena in run throughs), we only ever did agility because he was crazy and now he’s not, he’s twelve and he shouldn’t have to do something he doesn’t find to be fun.

But he’s my heart dog and it’s hard to do this thing that I only have to do because he’s getting older. 

Loose in the house together with a bone each, Chico and Bonney will trade them back and forth, always wanting what they don’t have, even arguing about it.

Closed in their crates with a bone, they don’t chew the bones, they forlornly look at me, clearly expecting to be left out of something fun.

But each will stay in an open crate and chew her or his ‘assigned’ bone without bothering the other. At least, they did this evening. 

This series of pictures was taken to make sure that I had something nice to show the garden stake. At the maximum snow depth after our February blitz of storms, the tips of the little ears of the garden stake just barely stuck up out of the snow.

But it turns out, I was really taking these sweet pix of Chico. 

This is the best one. Look at his little pink tongue sticking out. 

Rally Obedience is a more relaxed version of formal obedience work, and it’s something a lot of older agility dogs do – less stress on the body with a chance to work together in the familiar team setting.

Chico and I have been doing some rally classes and he really loves it. Last Friday our teacher recorded one of our “runs” and I now offer it for your viewing pleasure. Just look how happy my boy is!

https://vimeo.com/207036694