The Zoe Report

As I mentioned last week, garage sales are taking a back seat as we take baby Zoe to puppy kindergarten. We had a real surprise the first week. Our devil-may-care little miss who spends hours every day whooping her big brother Edward

    

turned out to be the shyest one in class! She didn’t want to go visit other people, and during puppy playtime she watched from under the chairs.

When we arrived for her second class, a group of guys were leaving the building. Now she was able to show her true colors…she planted herself between my feet and barked at them! I assured her they were terrified. (They were laughing too hard to contradict me.) Guess it worked to build her confidence, because she was much braver in class this time, and during playtime actually started to romp with the other two little cuties in the ‘shy group.’

We have to miss class next Saturday; we’re both doing workshops at a preschool conference. So Zoe gets an extra week to recover from the rigors of her education.

I’m guessing she’ll come out of her shell a bit more each week. I really am surprised, she’s so intrepid at home I was more worried she’d be beating up the big pups. She gets her final puppy shot tomorrow, so in a couple of weeks we can start taking her around the neighborhood for more socializing. We live just half a block from an elementary school, where lots of moms walk to pick up their kids, and several of them bring along the family dog. I foresee some mid-afternoon strolls in our future!

And I’m happy to report that Zoe’s actual obedience training is coming along, as well as the social skills. She’s already a champ at sit, and pretty darned good at coming when she’s called. We’ve been working on ‘down’ which has taken longer. I wasn’t having any luck at all luring her into a down position from a sit – and then we realized that we were trying to do it on the tile kitchen floor. That’s just way too cold for her bare little belly! So we practiced on carpet until she figured out what was going on, and today I finally got a ‘down’ in the kitchen. Didn’t last long, that bald pink tummy still doesn’t like cold tile, but down she went!

This is the first time in my life I get to stay home with a baby pet instead of having to go to work each day. Just in case you were wondering…yeah, this is a lot better than working!