Gracie- 7 months

Time flies; The Labrador is 7 months old this week.  She gained 3lbs this last month to make it to 36lbs.  It looks like she better go through a growth spurt quickly as she's falling behind mini Fiona's progression!

Gracie is turning out to have the perfect temperament for service dog work.  She really loves to work, really loves to please and gets super excited about praise, and still has a great overall calmer personality.  It's hard to see that calm side some times at this age, but it's there!  At this stage she has zero issues that concern me. The main thing with Gracie is continuing to work on impulse control- all training issues.

I've gone back to having other people do basic doggy zen with her.  While Gracie has fantastic control around food with me, she thinks it's perfectly alright to launch herself at other people.

But on the pro side, she's re-graduated to being trusted being left in my cubicle without having to be crated.  Her previous earned freedom was taken away when she started eating my 2ft barrier board to keep the dog's in.  She had also started leaping over my board whenever anyone interesting walked by.  Manners seemed to be relearned these last 2 weeks, fingers crossed.

I admit I haven't done much formal training this past month with her.  I've been focusing quite a bit on Lance's obedience work with help from his Denise Fenzi online class.  (New classes start in August, highly recommended!).

Trying to think of things she knows now that she didn't know since our 6 month update.  Hard due to lack of actual training!

1. Distance downs- Way better.  Awesome cookie toss downs too and I'm starting to delay the call until she's moving towards me.  Mini drop on recalls.

2. Wait/boundary cue-  I think she gets the boundary cue now.  I do very little "formal" training with it, just kinda use it often in every day life.  Gracie seems to get that when I cue wait it means stop following me and hang out in that area.

3. Crossed paws- Can successfully do with a foot signal about 50% of the time.  The other half she gets confused and wants to do her sad trick instead.  Is great if I point the ground where I want her cross.  (Have only worked her left over right so far)

The end.

Note, the chewed corner on my board...