Four Months

Friday will be the four month anniversary of the day we brought home Tessie and Skippy.  They have had a busy four months and they both have learned a lot and grown a lot.  The picture this week is of the puppies in their new life jackets.  We decided to buy them to make them feel a little more buoyant in the water.  They both did great when they swam but I think they will like having these.  We will try them this weekend on the puppies' first camping trip in NH.

Tessie makes small improvements everyday.  She is now 7 months old.  Our trainer, who we have been attending class with since late March, tells us every class how impressed she is with how we've been able to help Tessie.  She continues to come out of her shell and show more and more people why we love her so much.  We plan to try agility training with her in the fall.  I brought it up to our trainer a few weeks ago because I thought it would be something she would enjoy.  Tessie has boatloads of energy and in my opinion she needs a more strenuous outlet than a walk or two each day.  Our trainer thinks it will help her gain a lot of confidence, as it helped her shelter dog immensely!  We plan to enroll her in an intro class to see if she liked it.  We also have a few things at home to use to get her started.  She knows sit, come, shake, wait, stay, with me, and down - which she does like there is a incoming missile (quite funny).  She also just mastered heel, which only took her about 40 minutes to get.  I just finished reading the book Marley and Me by John Grogan.  It was a great book that I would immediately recommend to any dog lover/owner.  There were so many little quirks that Grogan described in Marley that we also see in Tessie.  She is a big, goofy lab when she feels comfortable enough to be herself...hopefully as time goes on that will happen more and more (and not just at home).  

Skippy is Skippy.  We have yet to find another dog like him.  He was 6 months old this week.  He loves to kiss and cuddle.  He knows how to play fetch and when he wants to he's quite good at it.  He's still a little protective of Tess, something we don't want him to feel like he has to do.  When we enroll Tessie in agility class I think we will enroll him in the next level of training to give them a little away time from each other.  Skippy knows sit, down, shake, wait, stay, come, with me, and I'm working on sit up.  He does much better with the cutesy circus dog tricks (sit up, shake), while Tessie is better at the good old originals (come, stay, heel).  He loves being the center of attention (still) and continues to interrupt any attention that Tessie is given.  He loves to eat and contrary to what I believe, he has grown.  It is hard for me to notice day to day but looking back at his first pictures he looks so small and boney!  I love looking back at the one-a-week photo albums and I am so glad I did that.  The differences in them are hard to see day by day but looking at how they have changed in four months is incredible!