Bailey's Progress Report

Recovery

Bailey has recovered quite nicely from her surgery :-). She's almost back to her old self now. Our cuddle time with her is once again limited to a minute or two at a time. She was so pitiful for the first few days, but that didn't last long at all.  I think I'll start running with her again next week. We may start running in the evenings since it's getting cooler and it's still dark when we wake up in the morning. 

Toys/Treats

This is her teddy bear I got for her to have when she got home from her surgery. I looked everywhere for a large stuffed animal that wasn't ridiculously expensive and seemed fairly well made. I didn't have a lot of luck until I finally found this one at Goodwill. The only downside is that it had the hard beady eyes. I didn't want to have to worry about Bailey eating them, so I took them off and sewed the eyes shut. I wouldn't let her have it before her surgery, but she stole it off the coffee table a few times while I was in the process of sewing it up. When  I picked her up, she didn't want anything to do with it. She finally started to play with it around Tuesday. This is when I knew she was getting back to her old self. 

The deer antler is still going strong! She's had it for almost a month now and it's still got lots of life in it. Definitely worth $12 and we'll for sure be buying more when she finally finishes this one off. 

Training
We finally found a dumbbell to work on retrieving stuff with Bailey. We didn't want to use any of her current toys (or anything that looked like her current toys) because we didn't want her to get training time confused with play time. We're focusing on "take it" right now. It's kind of boring, but it's the first step to a lot of the big tricks we want to teach her. We've worked on this in the past, but with treats. Of course we didn't have any trouble getting her to take her treats. Now we're using the dumbbell (which is really a rubber dog bone we got at Target). She'll put it in her mouth, but we haven't gotten her to hold it in her mouth yet. She just bites down and lets go. Eventually, we'll be able to get her to take other things. This is how we'll eventually teach her to put away her toys (my big trick) and bring a beer (Josh's big trick). It's kind of hard to work on this when there are other cute tricks we want to teach her, but I know it will pay off in the end.

Potty Training

BIG improvement here. She hasn't had any more accidents since my sister left. Maybe we were having trouble with her because there was another female dog in the house (who was about to come in heat)? Whatever it was, I'm SO glad she's back to her old self in that area. She's even started to pick up on the poochie bells. We've placed them at the stairs on the second floor since that's where we are most of the time. She's been hitting them by herself for a while now, but only when we ask her if she needs to go out. Yesterday, she hit them on her own while we were watching TV. I was SO excited. This morning when I took her out, she hit them before she started to go downstairs. I used to have to make her stop at the top of the stairs then ask her before she hit them. I'm so glad she's finally picking up on what they're for! It may have been easier for her to associate them with going out if they were on the door rather than the stairs, but we weren't sure if we would hear them or if she would even go ring them without us since she used to wait at the stairs. 

Food

Bailey has been completely on her new food for almost 3 weeks now. Her fur is SO soft and shiny. I love rubbing her and I'm so glad we decided to switch to TOTW. I know she likes it a lot. When I e-mailed them, they sent 2 bags of each of their flavors. We kept the ones we didn't choose as training treats. They're fine for if we're getting her to do something simple. If we're doing something more complicated or something she doesn't like doing, we have to bring out the big guns, Beggin Strips. Haha.