The Look

Summer finally arrived in upstate NY and I have been training, camping, visiting family and friends, gardening and keeping up with volunteer activities.  Also occasionally cleaning my house and trialing.  Finally, training a running dog walk is very time consuming…not the actual training time but the obsessing over the video.  All in all, that’s a  recipe for NOT writing in this blog.  I have grand intentions of videoing some of our sessions and putting a montage together.  Hasn’t happened.

So…what prompts me to write now?  Well…it’s the look that Tai has been giving me after some of our training sessions.  It says “we did good together, didn’t we Mom?”.    Here is a shot of that “look” after a running dog walk session today.  I love it.  It says to me that he’s learned we are a team and partners as we play and have fun together doing this strange, pretty unnatural but totally addictive sport called agility.

Tai will be 18 months old in a few days. Yikes!  Where did the time go?

His training is coming along but probably slowly by some people’s standards.  I watched a friend put her 14 month old neatly  through a whole course, contacts, weaves and all yesterday.  Made me wonder what I’ve been doing!  I guess the answer is a combination of a long winter, giving Tai time to grow up and just plan not being in a hurry.

So a quick review: contacts in progress; weaves at the proofing stage; jumping coming along nicely; working our way through box work exercises showing that our flatwork foundation is paying off nicely.  Trying not to forget little things like revisiting our table training.

Still some challenges for sure…he still needs desensitizing around other dogs running agility…I really need to get on that more deliberately.  Will make that a project and part of my record keeping for the rest of the summer. 

Bottom line?  We’re having fun and working our way through lots of challenges (or opportunities rather)….We are at the beginning of a journey that will no doubt lead to lots of new “opportunities”.  I hope it is a very long road… a road as long as my friend Nancy’s with her wonderful dog Morgan who left us last week.  Morgan was 16 yrs old and had a huge heart – part of which I know he generously left with Nancy and her family.   As I watch Lacey slow down and find new ways to enjoy summer…like sleeping under the table, it’s a reminder to enjoy it all.