April 5: Ildi's 5 months old!

Ildi is 5 months old now and it seems like she's really grown! we were away for a week, and she had the excellent care of her 'grandparents' - who have 2 dogs of their own. When we came by to pick her up, I couldn't believe how much she had grown!
As a birthday gift, we've now tried to give her more free reign of the house - though we constantly check on her to see what she is chewing on in the living room; usually the plants or the shag rug or sitting on the couch. though yesterday she did find the mirror to okay with (see video) :)

March 9: Ildi's new habits

We've noticed that Ildi is getting confident and curious and we've discovered that with that comes more 'bad' habits (read habits that we need to figure out how to stop or curb).

Perhaps it's timed with the relief of a warm week so all the snow has melted everywhere and in the fields we always walk in she seems to have a new wealth of smells available to her. In areas we once let her off-leash to explore and she would come when called, there is now no way she will return to you; she wanders off further in the opposite direction and I can actually believe that she can't hear you at all when she's in scent tracking mode. Like the Dog Whisperer says, '60% of her brain is controlled by smell' so that means that more than half of her brain is turned off to us humans. But it's getting worse and we fear we're ruining the recall command when we call her and she doesn't come. A few times she's even popped her head up, looked right at us, we call her and she runs in the other direction - still scent tracking of course. So we're going back to basics in some ways. We're only going to let her off-leash if we're certain she will come back to us and when she's playing with other dogs in the off-leash park. And we're going to be practicing our recall command under heavy distraction. I'm curious what this experience was like for other hunting dogs as puppies. I'll have to ask my friend who has two adult Vizslas.

Another one is that with the warm weather, the glacier in our backyard has melted so she can finally go and explore. Except we've learned that in her mind that means chew off branches or pull them out from the ground and eat the decorative grass (that once stood 5 ft tall) and any other periennal. I suppose we then shouldn't let her into the backyard unless we can supervise her at all times, but she was just moments away from figuring out how to get past our barriers so she would have gotten to the backyard on her own anyways. and she loves the backyard! whenever she's bored in the house she asks to go out and just sits in the yard - then starts to chew and eat my plants. I'm curious if dogs grow out of this behaviour?
oh - and here's a link to a site that lists all the indoor and outdoor plants that are poisonous to dogs; looks like I have some pulling to do :(
http://www.dogpack.com/health/poisonplants.htm

And suddenly she's started barking more. She now barks when she's playing with other dogs - as if to invite them to keep playing. and she started barking yesterday at something in the backyard that freaked her out (I think it was the wind), but she continued barking from inside the house still - at whatever was freaking her out. Then again last night when we were seeing friends and their puppy to the door (after a puppy play session). She stood behind her gate barking - obviously upset that she was left alone in the kitchen and she could see us all standing just a few feet away, but she never would have started barking in that situation before. Someone once told that as she gets more confident, she'll bark more. hmmm - how to curb this, fast!

but thankfully, at the end of the day, she still loves a good cuddle and nap in our laps! that always help to melt away the frustrations of the day :)

March 6: learnings

so I realize that I don't stop and think about the things that Ildi doesn't do anymore or rather has grown out of. And they're all things that drove us nuts and we wished she would stop doing -turns out that with many of those things, she did stop doing. So there is hope! and that hope gets me through the days when she's picked up new bad habits and I wonder if (eating the plants in my backyard, for example) will ever stop.

The 'not good things' she's stopped doing:
- chewing our hands, fingers, arms constantly. She still does it every once in awhile; usually when she's tired - she's like a little kid, she gets to be a real nuisance when she's due for a nap. We call it "going moray eel" as she looks like one the way she swings her open jaws everywhere :)
- she's stopped chewing on chair legs
- she's stopped chewing up the rug. We actually don't even normally have a rug in the kitchen (still the only room she's allowed in loose), but she was running around and sliding so much that we were worried it would cause hip displaysia so we bought a cheap area rug to prevent her from sliding into walls. She used to just chew on it and try to take it apart thread by thread. I think it been a few weeks since she's done that!
- no more bathroom trips outside in the middle of the night!
- dare I say she's house trained - we haven't had any accidents in the house for about a month and she regularly 'rings the bell' when she wants to go out.

but thankfully she still likes to nap with us! :) here's a picture of her and Chad napping.




oh - and today I think she may have eaten a dead mouse. I can't be certain as she has her mouth in everything when we're out for a walk. But for some reason, this time, I thought 'oh god, that's a mouse'. I don't know if I'm more scared about what eating a mouse could do to her or that if she's throw it up and there would be a mouse in my house!
and that reminds me - will there be a time when she won't put EVERYTHING in her mouth that she finds outside?

next posting will be about all the new habits she's started in on! :)

Day 3: we're learning

Last night Ildi woke us up 4 times to 'do her business' (one of them was a false alarm though). We sleep pretty light as we're still trying to learn what all her different whines mean. Right now, any time she whines we get up, take her out of her kennel and take her outside to pee.
Have I mentioned we live in Calgary, Canada and it's January! it's cold outside at 3am when you've just gotten out of your warm bed!

Thurs morning we weighed her (before she ate breakfast) - 12.5lbs (we'll start a graph soon).
Only 2 accidents inside the house today! but I give ourselves most of the credit and not Ildi as we take outside almost every hour :) We've started rating the day; she's 16 (successfull trips to the bathroom)/ 18 (total bathrooms)!

We practiced with her leash today inside the house and in the backyard. and we introduced her to kids for the first time by way of our friend's 3 and 7 year old. Ildi LOVES people and kids - seriously - she gets so excited and all she wants is to be pet. She did well with the kids - especially because we're all nervous, not knowing what she would do and I'm sure she could sense it.

We also created a dictionary for ourselves for the commands that we want to be using with her - that way my husband and I are consistent with what we're teaching.

We definitely need to stop her from chewing everyone and everything! Never having a puppy before, I didn't quite expect the amount of chewing. Is it her, is it her breed or is every puppy this way?