Happy New Year to all! Waffles had a busy couple of weeks — one of which he spent solo with his dad and elderly brother while I was out of town to visit family. I swear he doubled in size while I was gone! He’s now a “long boi” who has lost many teeth and is growing many more new chompers.

On December 17, Waffles graduated from Puppy Kindergarten and passed the AKC’s STAR Puppy Test which covers some fun pre-CGC (Canine Good Citizen) skills. He had a blast! Many thanks to our instructor Ali at Cloud 9 for the super fun class.

Training Plans

Waffles started school at the Animal Humane Society at the recommendation of one of our fellow doggo peoples here in the Twin Cities (Thanks, Amy!) Their obedience school operates like a gym membership: attend as often as you’d like every week, go up the five levels of training (and re-attend lower level classes as desired!) and take your time learning things.

Since Waffles really needs work on focus and becoming totally people neutral and dog neutral, this is perfect for us! It turns out that one of the instructors here has experience training service dogs, so we really lucked out. We have our new training home lined up for the next year or so! Right now we’re attending class Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

After having been gone a whole week, we have a little work to do remember our working manners without letting the excitement break our fragile little puppy brains. Waffles is an adorable doofus who is very, very distractible but who can be bribed into offering calm behavior for rewards.

This week we’ll be focussing on working around the house while tethered to a handler and rewarding each and every offer of calm behavior. We’ll also be working on all his obedience skills and attempting to transfer those to more distracting settings. It’s hard to be a puppy! We’ll also be working on loose leash walking and responding to leash pressure.

And to end this short blog post: Enjoy this sequence of pictures illustrating the joy of shoveling with a puppy after a heavy snowfall!

Have a fantastic week and a wonderful start to the new year!