3/10/03

Yeah, so sleep is a thing of the past apparently. Sara is awake by 6am no matter when we put her to sleep. I don’t do well when I don’t get at least 9 hours of sleep so this is getting interesting, the last thing me or hubby want to do at 6am after 5 hours of sleep is go feed the puppy then take her outside in this wonderful 13 degree weather. I am seriously looking forward to her being a full grown dog rather than a puppy.

She’s doing pretty well as far as training goes. She knows her name and she knows the word “sit”. We’ve started working on “Come Here” as well. She’s really impatient but for the most part she’s not jumping at her food dish anymore when I put it down and as long as it’s not first thing in the morning hubby can usually get her to sit still while he snaps her collar on her. Potty training is going great! I read that puppies are unable to “hold it” until at least 10 weeks, but um, Sara’s 8 weeks and she’s definatly holding it. We’ve worked her up to 3 hours. We’re going home to check on her at lunch today. My mom seems to think we should have been able to work her up to a full 8 hours by now but c’mon, she’s just a puppy. Hell, even I can hardly hold it more than 2 hours.

The cats are very curious now. Sally likes to watch Sara from the stairs or anywhere higher. Sally knows that if she gets down on the floor Sara will come over to her. Last night they were face to face and I saw Sara’s tongue come out at Sally, hehe. Sally took off. Kenny came downstairs too on Saturday night to watch the puppy. When Sara came over though he poofed all up, hissed and ran off. We’ve been grabbing Sara b/c she’ll chase after the cats when they run off. We want them to feel safe and not threatened and we want Sara to understand that it’s not acceptable to chase cats, even if you do mean well. Casper also came down last night, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen watching Sara. That was the first time he’d been downstairs since we got her. He’s always hated dogs, my grandma has a little pomeranian that she used to bring over, but then again Casper hates other cats too. He’s a grumpy old man. 🙂 I don’t expect anything out of Victoria. I expect her to stay upstairs since she didn’t go downstairs before we got the puppy. She’s content upstairs. We probably won’t ever let Sara upstairs, that will be kitty only territory. The upstairs isn’t all that big to begin with and I want the cats to have a place where they can leave their toys out and be alone and stuff.

I think right now the biggest problem with her is the fact that she play bites and jumps up. The jumping up isn’t all that bad since she’s so small but it will get bad when she’s bigger. We’re working on teaching her “OFF”. The play biting is just flat out obnoxious. What sucks though is this is the way puppies play with one another so it’s tough to teach her to quit biting. Several websites recommended to what another puppy would do if it was hurt by the biting. Make a loud noise and sulk and ignore the biter. So that’s what we’ve been doing. Yelling “OUCH” and ignoring Sara until she calms back down. We also hand her a chew toy when she looks like she’s getting bitey to try to prevent it.

All in all she’s doing great and I’m sure her puppy days will just fly by. We’ll be reminiscing on puppy days and sleeping in till 9 on Sunday in no time. 😉