Update Time

I haven't posted anything for a little while so here we go.

I've had Fletcher for two and a half weeks and so far he's made me laugh and cry and tear my hair out in absolute frustration. We have a few mouthing and biting issues that are slowly- very, very, very slowly- being made progress on. He's more or less got "sit" down pat, unless he gets distracted and then he's off and there's no way to get him back. I've started luring him for "drop" and will keep working at that. He's had an automatic sit and focus for his meals since day two and I started moving the bowl out to my side and up and down yesterday, working on focus away from the food and directed at my eyes. Absolutely no issues with that so far; I put the bowl out to the side the first time and he didn't even look at it, just kept staring at my eyes, so I'm super happy with that. Now if only he could have even an inch of that focused attention for everything else...

He had his second injection last Tuesday and will go in for his third and final in about three weeks time. I've also just booked him in for puppy preschool and he'll start that in three weeks, too. He went for his first proper swim in our pool this afternoon before it bucketed down with rain and seemed to quite enjoy it, so I can't wait until I can start to take him to the beach with Charlie- should only be about five more weeks and then he'll be classified "fully vaccinated" and can go and mingle. As far as his eye goes, it does seem like he has mild entropian in it, and he does tear in it a fair bit- and it seems to irritate him on occasion, especially if he bumps into something- so at this stage I'm almost definitely going to be looking at having it operated on once he's a bit older.

Poor Charlie's been a giant, furry, barking toy for Fletcher to chew on these past couple of weeks. We haven't been to many agility training sessions because of the crappy weather and we're having a short break until the 10th of January so it's a bit of a pain not having any equipment at home. I've got my fingers crossed dad might be able to finally give me a hand over the holidays so I can, at least, get one contact piece finished to practice on. Fletcher seems to have given him a boost, though, in terms of drive. He was so flat and sluggish for a few weeks, I got Fletcher and that Monday at training he was back to zooming about and responding so much quicker. Nothing like a puppy to give motivation. He's had a really long rest from rally classes- not really by choice, more so because of the weather, schoolwork, me being sick, Charlie hurting his leg... every Wednesday there seemed to be something on or wrong- so next year we're going to be back to them and putting way more effort into that than we have this past year. I've also got a big long list of agility, jumpers and games trials that should be on over next year and a lot are within a handy distance so fingers crossed we can do a lot more competing as well; getting my P plates near the middle of next year as well as turning eighteen (therefore not being a supervised junior anymore) should increase our options a bit more as well.

We've got our training club Christmas party on the 19th that Charlie and Fletch will both be going to; it'll be Fletcher's first real outing in such a chaotic environment with so many other strange dogs so I'm a bit nervous but it should all be good. We've also got, on the 21st, a photo shoot for a bit of a media launch thing at the training club as well which is always good fun. And hopefully we'll be able to go out in our dinghy a few times over the next few weeks with the dogs instead of the dog beach- safer for Fletcher as well as not so busy now the school holidays have started.

And that's about it. Busy time coming up, but it's sure to be a whole lot of fun.