Bailey's Progress Report

This is probably a bit overdue. Haha. I've decided it's not necessary to do these weekly anymore since Bailey isn't growing as quickly as she was and they're probably starting to get a little repetitive. 

Behavior wise, we have our good days and we have our bad days. Bailey is getting much better at understanding what we want from her. She is also going through a very rebellious stage, so it doesn't always matter if she understands or not. I know we still have several months of this left and it's definitely a challenge. She is testing her limits for sure. She used to be great about doing her tricks. Now, she grunts and huffs before she does them sometimes, and sometimes she'll just refuse to do them. I would say playing dead is probably her least favorite trick. Sometimes she'll run through all the other tricks she knows to see if she can get a treat for doing them without having to play dead. It's cute sometimes, but we never treat her until she does what we ask her to do. 

She's doing really well with potty training. She's consistently ringing her bells still. She didn't have any accidents when we went home a few weeks ago and she didn't have any over the past few weeks when we had visitors. These used to be the hardest times in terms of accidents. Until the other day, I'm not sure when she last had an accident. I'll take the blame for the accident the other day. I was cooking breakfast and she rang her bell twice. I ignored her because it hadn't been too long since Josh took her out. I figured she just wanted to go out and play. Well, I was wrong. She had to pee. Oops.

She's so-so on her walks. We were hoping we wouldn't need her pinch collar any more by now. It's definitely not something we want to always have to use. She usually pulls when I try to walk her without it. When she gets really excited, she doesn't respond to the pinch collar as well as she used to. 

We've slacked on her tricks. We're still working on say your prayers. I personally got really bad for just having her wave a time or two then letting her eat while we had visitors. I don't know why. It takes all of 5 minutes to work on new tricks before her meals. Because of this, we're about where we were a few weeks ago with the trick. She likely would have mastered it by now if we would have been working on it consistently. It's OK though, it's just a trick and she'll get it eventually. :-)

She's done really well with all our visitors. She did get overly excited a bit, but I suppose that can be expected since she's just a puppy and we don't have visitors much. She likes everybody so that's never an issue. We just have to worry about jumping and things of that sort. I don't know what we'll ever do if we have a visitor who hates dogs. She just wouldn't know what to do if someone didn't want to pet her or play with her. She was a bit more hard headed than usual while people were here. I'm not sure if it was just her being more rebellious, if she thought we weren't paying attention, or what it was, but there was definitely a noticeable difference. We had to repeat ourselves more than usual, which is something we try not to do. I think when she notices that we repeat our commands, she just learns that she doesn't have to listen the first time. It's really hard for us to stick to this. It's my first instinct to tell her to sit again if she doesn't listen the first time. We're working on that :-)

This is one night while Anna and John were here. It was past her bedtime and she was so tired. She had to stick around to see what was going on though. 

We decided when we got Bailey that she wouldn't be allowed on furniture. I've put her in bed a few times with me when Josh stayed up late to play games or on his basketball nights. He was OK with that. I actually think she prefers to sleep beside our bed, she always acts a little nervous when she gets on our bed, but she eventually gets settled and goes to sleep. I'm not sure if it's because it's so tall or what. Anyway, we have an ottoman that we haven't used since we got it. We started using it for Bailey's training when we started working on "paws up". We talked about it when we first got her and more the other day. We decided she could have the ottoman. She likes to be close to us and we don't always feel like laying on the floor with her, so I think this works out.

I think we're all happy with this arrangement :-) She's not allowed to sit up here while we're eating though (we eat here more than we do at the table).

We were originally not planning on getting a dog until January 2012. It wasn't hard for me to change my mind when we met Bailey, but Josh took some convincing. I wanted a dog for a companion, he wanted a dog for protection. He justified getting her (from a financial standpoint) by getting a dog rather than a security system. We live in a safe area, but Josh has been paranoid since he left home I think. Bailey didn't bark at anything at all when we first got her. Josh used to come home at night from basketball and she wouldn't pay the least bit of attention to him opening the door or even walking up the stairs. For about a month or so, she's been alerting us a lot better. She barks when she hears neighbors too, but hopefully she'll learn to tell the difference.  I'm not sure if she'll ever be able to distinguish the sound of cars coming to our driveway and our neighbors' since they are so close together. She's just a baby so she'll learn what normal sounds are with time. 

She's loving all the leaves. When it's windy and we're on walks, she'll try to chase the leaves. It's so cute. She tries to chase the leaves down the stream near our house too. She's much more comfortable playing in it than she used to be. She used to only drink out of it. Now she will chase sticks and leaves. I thought she would like water a bit more since she has a little bit of lab in here. She definitely hasn't gotten that from the lab. So far I think she just has the coat and the toes of a lab. She definitely has a Pit temperament and energy :-).