Happy 4!

I made it home for the weekend after a totally exhausting week at work. Many folks were on vacation or out of the office, so I found myself taking on a lot of responsibility. We didn't have the boys coming in for training, so I did a lot of individual field trips into town with the dogs. Crisco to the coffee shop, Joplin to lunch, Cocoa to the train station, and Sprinkles home for the weekend.  This allowed me to get to know the individual dogs better and to assess their specific training needs. Train-the-trainer begins on Tuesday. This will be 6 weeks of extremely intensive lecture and practicum on how to be a dog trainer. ECAD holds this course every summer and interested people can pay to attend. As part of the 6 weeks, we each get assigned our own dog to "finish". This means that the dog will be with us, essentially acting as our service dog and forming a very tight bond only with us. For the entire time, we are not allowed to separate from the dog, taking it everywhere we go and getting it ready to hand over to a client with disabilities at the end of train-the-trainer. I will be blogging about train-the-trainer on my blog (here, duh) and likely also on ECAD's Facebook page.

Sophie and Sprinkles

But before class begins, I am enjoying a not-so-relaxing weekend at home with relatives visiting and 4 crazy dogs (Pauly, Sophie, KK, and Sprinkles, an ECAD dog). 4 for the fourth!  Sprinks and I need to have a chat about this 6am wakeup call thing because it's not working for me.  Yesterday she joined my mom, brother, and I on 4 hours of painful errands (Costco, Target, Marshall's, Home Depot) and was absolute perfection.  She was focused, followed all directions, and was practically invisible.  I was really impressed and proud of her.