the sheltiechick blog

Easter Egg Hunt 2009

It was nice and sunny outside, warm enough that I just needed a jacket – so OUTSIDE WE GO for the egg hunt this year! I had the camera but was slightly less inclined to throw myself on the muddy ground for photos the way I can lay on the living room floor and get photos whenever we go the egg hunt indoors, so my angles are a little different than usual.


This egg was hidden inside the gator’s mouth – I didn’t get a shot of him knocking it out of the mouth to pick it up.


Cookie treats inside the eggs!


Ohhhhh egg.


Nosing it over to me so I can open it for him…


…until he decided it was easier to open them himself.


This is the third year we’ve done an egg hunt, and this year he was pretty good at remembering how to open the eggs with just enough to pressure to pop them as opposed to actually chomping down and breaking them. (He broke a couple the first year… oops!)


EGG NOM.


MORE EGG NOM.


All the eggs are in the basket! He wouldn’t sit nicely next to them so I gave up and told him, “Fine – get up and do something cute with the basket.”


Which means he pushed it over with his paw.


Yeah okay, I admit it – that’s pretty cute.


Trying to open them again in case he missed a cookie somehow…


He still wouldn’t sit down nicely next to them. But okay that’s pretty cute too.


He nosed the basket over to knock the rest of the eggs out…


…and resumed opening them to make SURE they were really empty.

You see, he doesn’t trust that when I say “No, the treats are REALLY gone,” that I’m being honest. I don’t know why. I’ve never lied to him.
About all the treats being gone, anyway.


Agility Update

The weather has gotten a little better, and last week we managed to get out to J’s house twice and work outside – practice we desperately needed since our first trial is coming up in a few weeks here.

First, the jumping is going pretty well. His confidence is pretty good and he was taking the 12 inch jumps outside nicely, better judging his take off points. This week in our jumping program we are entering the Problem Solving phase, which may prove pretty challenging. I’m nervous about it, because I don’t want to really shake Auggie’s confidence right before a trial, but I feel like we need to just keep pushing forward and hope for the best. What else can we do?
There will be a VMO present at our trial at the end of this month, and I’m desperately hoping Auggie is thinking short that day… nothing to do but hope for the best.

Second, we got to put the target on the full height a-frame for the first time and it went SPLENDID. He really gets the idea of driving to the bottom now rather than hopping off halfway down. I’m hoping we continue to have success with that in the weeks that come and his bad habits don’t return.

J informed me that this spring we’ll be focusing on obstacle discrimination when it comes to things like a tunnel under an a-frame or dogwalk. “You’ll see that in open,” she tells me, as though she thinks we’ll soon be competing in open standard…
Let’s just get a SINGLE NA leg first, and then I can start worrying about open standard!

Anyway, I have many many many videos to edit and upload, and I will get on that soon, but finals are creeping up and I have been working on some large-ish projects that need to be completed… uh… well, Friday. So until I get a chance to really sit down and edit the videos, then post them all on YouTube, then write about it here… you’ll just have to believe me that Auggie did AMAZING on his last day of the series of five oxers!! Nice, even pacing, sailing over the jumps – just gorgeous!