Molly
Well, it may not seem like a lot to you, but I have had about 1300 visitors to my website since it all started, 15 months ago. I never expected to get daily visitors, and don't really know why since I am not blogging every day any more. For some reason today I opened up my stats and saw that number and felt proud of myself. When I was blogging every day, some times it helped and others it made my day worse, dwelling on what was wrong. I need to get back to doing this, I think.
I have been spending my days on the computer, mostly just goofing off with Plurk!, Twitter and FaceBook. Since I put the little monster into daycare, my horrible days where I needed my husband to come home early from work have decreased dramatically. I am starting back to school in less than three weeks now! It grows closer and closer, and I hope that I am ready. I don't know what I can do to prepare except get the financial stuff taken care of, buy some notebooks and put them into a backpack.
The big news coming from my corner is that a puppy has joined our household. She is MY dog, I am the one to care for her, clean up her poop and train her. We got her almost two weeks ago, and she is now almost 9 weeks old. The housebreaking is going well, if I were to pay more attention; she wouldn't have any accidents at all. We are going to puppy school, which is fun, she gets to run and play with other puppies, and all the proud parents get to laugh and enjoy the antics. She seems to be a pretty good student, I have been using a clicker, which I think is more effective than using a marker word like “yes”. I think it would be difficult for a little one to hear that word over other distractions and can change with emotion and inflection. A clicker is louder and you would have a hard time finding something with similar noise in a normal situations.
Oh yeah, her name is Molly, and she is a pretty girl. She is ½ hound, which most likely is Coon Hound, the other half, her mom, was Lab/Chow. She is such a crazy addition to the house. The mouthing and nipping will stop soon, I hope, it gets bad and I have to keep her away from Monster. The girl gets upset and tries to run away, but that only makes Molly want to chase; it turns into a game. I put her in timeout some days when she gets too rough. I have crate trained her, and it really didn't take too long. She uses it as a napping place, going in there all on her own, and eats her meals in there, then sleeps there at night. Overnights, she can go up to 7 hours in the crate without an accident. The first few nights she either cried and cried or had an accident. I'm glad that stage is over, Husband is too, he was the one to get up with her, or sleep with her downstairs on the couch so she wouldn't cry. With my medications I sleep so heavily it hard to wake me, but I did set my alarm one night at 3am so that I could let her out. Turns out it was a bad thing to wake her up; she wouldn't settle back down and cried off and on until 7am when I usually get up. The next night we waited for her to wake us up, and she didn't. She hasn't since then either. Pretty good for a 7 week old puppy to wait 6 hours to go outside!!
Having a dog at home will be good for me. I (eventually) will feel more secure in the house during the day and those nights Husband is away. She will keep me busy trying to train her and care for her, and Molly will be like a therapy dog for me. I hope to cuddle and do breathing exercises with her during panicky times. With the training I am going to do, I hope to have her get the “Canine Good Citizen” award from the AKC and become an “Animal Ambassador” with the humane society I currently volunteer with. She will go to schools and nursing homes for education and lots of lots of love. I have been doing a lot of research on-line, with books and watching videos; I am excited to get to the point where we can start the really fun stuff!
