What a Fun Week

We were back to work last week and actually managed to work the entire week without a day off. The week was pretty routine, even meetingless (which always makes me happy).

With Sunday being Superbowl, I needed to pick up a few things for snacking during the game. Unfortunately, the only time for me to do this was Friday afternoon/evening at Sam's Club. Oh my! What a zoo. Bless Mariko's heart, she hung right in there and was perfect, but I did see a couple of side-ways glances at me with her quietly telling me "what, are you crazy bringing us into this zoo?' I was pretty proud of how perfect she was.

Saturday we headed to Petsmart obedience at noon. I had both Mariko and Bailey, so the trainer worked with Mariko a bit, which was nice to have someone else training with her. After class we "let the labs go" in the training area (there are three labs/labxs in class), all with balls in their mouths, for a little bit of play. They had a blast!

From there I loaded both dogs into the car and headed south for agility classes. Bailey's class is from 3-4 p.m. and then I had to kill time until 7 p.m. for Mariko's class. (I need to come up with a different plan next week, I about froze my legs off waiting in the car :-( )

It was really fun to learn a different way to start training a puppy in agility. Mariko was just flat out amazing. We are trying to catch up (three of us) to a couple of other handlers that started the first of January. For the first class the dogs learned "target" (which for Mariko is an advanced command and we cannot use so . . . Mariko is learning "hit"). This command is used to make sure the dogs have at least two feet on the contact spot of an obstacle. The next lesson was a "right here" command to tell the dog which side/where you want them to come to when they are coming off/out of an obstacle. Again "here" is a command for something else for Mariko so we are going to use "with me" to que her. From there we learned "ready, steady . . . . go" (so wish I would have learned this with Bailey). This is a starting line command where you have your dog in a starting line stay, but you're getting them really excited and ready to take off  (literally). Since Mariko needs to be "released" from a command, we use "ready, steady . . . . release" and look out, she is on a dead run :-)
Lastly, for this class, we learned tunnel. Needless to say, there was no training involved for Mariko here, I just have to figure out how in the world I can get to where I need to be before she comes out of that tunnel because she is flying :-) (oh, to be young again).

We had a little over an hour drive to get home, and even with both dogs in the back of the car in their kennels, resting, this was where I found them about 10 minutes after we arrived home :-)

Tired, tired puppy.

Lights are on, puppy is out.

We had so much fun! I can't wait to see what she learns next week.