Pyra at 9wks

Pyra's training for the last two weeks have been going pretty well.  She's an eager learner and has certainly learned to love eating her meals!  I don't think Py quite understands the concept of offering behaviors, but you can see the wheels turning.  And that's my favorite part of training puppies!

Our lunch and dinner training time  have been focused on the following little list of skills:

1. Pivoting.  First in front and now she's becoming a little pro about pivoting to heel position on her own and to my right side with a tiny bit of help still.  My favorite thing to teach!

2. Crate games. Working on driving to a crate from 2 feet away and then staying in with the door open.  We don't have a ton of distance yet as leaving the food to offer a behavior is much harder than being able to look at the food and offer a behavior!

3. Hand nudges.  Hard to tell if she fully understands the concept or is just doing it because she thinks I might have a treat in that hand :)  Jumping up for a vertical hand nudge is about only 50% reliable.

4. Fold back downs.  Py gets the game I'm playing with really fast downs.  As soon as reward one down and move the treat hand to get her up again she folds into a down as fast as possible.  Not much thinking involved about the word down at this point.  She also likes to offer downs when offering jumping up doesn't seem to work.

5. All feet in a box.  Pyra finds this one lots of fun!  Mainly we have lots of jumping and falling over.  If I have a treat lure she is capable of calmly climbing in and purposefully lifting the back legs.  Without the lure, not so much.

6. Go Mat.  The most recent thing I started training with Py.  Since she has been a bit slower than some of my other dogs to offer behaviors I wanted to do obvious objects with some height to it before starting a mat.

7. Other tricks.  Walking on my feet, leg weaves, rollover, and shake have all been started.

For the other 90% of her day, Pyra is being a pretty easy puppy.  Is continuing to do well with being mostly quiet in the crate.  I didn't even have to shun her to the office as I taught classes this past week!  At home she's doing fantastic in the kennel and her early potty break is now when Vito gets his 6:30am meds.  Then is doing repeated but short bouts of fussing at having to go back to bed.  So nice to have a normal Toller with the crate!

She loves toys and has a pretty natural play retrieve.  Lots and lots of tugging and chasing after Momma games.  Puppy biting isn't much of an issue with her as Py prefers to give kisses.

She LOVES playing with other dogs and is very calm and confident meeting new dogs.  Already Pyra has started some whining and barking at dogs she wants to greet while on leash.

And the cat seems to have teamed up with Pyra to cause as much trouble as possible.  They enjoy wrestling and chasing each other around the house quite a bit.  Oddly enough the cat has even started bolting out to the fenced potty yard when Pyra goes out and the two of them refuse to come inside.  They also enjoy doing this to any closed door that happens to open for a second.  It's twice as much work to try and corral two creatures!

Her weight this last Monday on her 9 wk birthday was up to 11.4lbs.