Vacation Week - woohoo!

This picture is of Skippy and Juma, the Mastiff that lives in the house behind my mom's.  I mentioned him in another post and I've been waiting and waiting to get a shot of them together.  There is a chain link fence between the two yards and every time I let Skip and Tessie out over there the first thing they do is run to the fence to see if Juma and Bindi are out.  Bindi is an American Bulldog that the family also has.  Their mom tells me they do the same thing.  They love coming out to see the puppies.  Bindi and Tess will run up and down the fence together over and over and over.  

This week I am off from work so my plan is to do some training with the puppies.  It's hard to work with them when I'm at work all day because 1. I'm tired and 2. they want to play not work.  At this point they both know "sit," "down," and "shake" but we say "paw."  We haven't gotten to "Stay" at Puppy K yet but that's definitely tops on my list for this week.  Skippy has been starting "sit up" because that's his natural inclination when he's sitting and I'm holding food over his head.  Tessie seems less inclined to learn the fluff commands.  She took to "down" right away but getting her to give me her paw was like pulling teeth.  I'd like to work on the leash walking too but that has to be done when I have someone else to help me.  The puppies and I will also be working on packing things up for our move to Hopedale.  I'd like to be able to bring a load of stuff down their each day but we will see how it goes.  We should be into the new house by the end of May.  I can't wait.

Another thing we've been working on is getting the puppies to stop eating mulch.  I've never seen two dogs that want to eat mulch more than these two.  I think Skippy took to it after watching Tessie but now they both do it.  It's particularly bad when I take them to their mom's.  I don't want them ingesting it so I end up having to chase them to get it away from them.  Yesterday my dad put up garden fencing which seems to work so far, although Skippy stuck his head through it a couple times.  

Other than the mulch issue, we've had a great couple of afternoons going down to Milford to play.  They love seeing Bindi and Juma and they love being outside.  Yesterday was pretty warm so I put some ice cubes in their water, which Tessie loved!  It looked as if she was bobbing for ice cubes and when she would get one she would lie in the grass and eat it, she loved them!  It distracted her from the mulch for a while too, which is a very good thing.  

Here are a couple videos of the puppies shaking paws....