Well, last week’s training went kind of crappy because I was involved in something else going on… the big news I hinted about in the last post…

We’re moving!! Because I bought a house!! Ahhhhh!!

There’s some work to be done after close before we move in, but we should still get some nice time in the fall to work in the backyard! Payton is super lucky to get to learn all kinds of things in our brand new HUGE backyard, which has the space for all my jumps, a full-size dogwalk, a full-size a-frame should I decide to upgrade from my mini-aframe, and pretty much anything else we could ever want. I could even give him an underground pool if I wanted to! (That is, however, not on my to-do list.)
Even more exciting – this means Miss Pepper gets to move in permanently! Hurraaaaaay!

Not a terrible time for Auggie to be retiring, overall. The money I would be spending on his entry fees is instead going to go towards doing some stuff on the house, and it will take some time to get Payton (and Peppy) ready to trial and my finances will have rebounded by then, so financially everything seems to have happened at about the right time. I have mailed in Auggie’s entry form for our last trial and have a Pinterest board to plan his party. I was a little sad filling the form out and mailing it in, but I know this is the right thing to do. Besides, with our brand new yard, Auggie will have plenty of room to run and play at home without any of the pressure he gets from trialing. All positive!

This does unfortunately mean Miss Georgie will lose her best buddy, half-Uncle Payton, and her grumpy Uncle Auggie (I admit to calling Auggie “Uncle Auggie” just about all the freakin’ time now) – but she will get to come over and play and train with us! So once again, still positives here. Besides, that means once she’s lonely, my parents will decide to get another dog for her to play with. ;>

All good stuff. So in light of this, my training schedules will probably be a little crappy because I have a lot going on the next few weeks and into the fall as we do some fixing up on the house and of course the actual move. I’ve decided to keep up the general training idea for now. Payton got one solid session of “grab the bumper,” which turned into an incredible fetch session with Georgie, who is now the proud owner of her very OWN bumper since she loved ours so much. However I don’t think his “grab the bumper” is where it should be. We’ll keep working on it, and Auggie could do with some extra “grab the bumper” training too.
Besides that, I’ve decided – against my better judgement, much like when I taught Auggie “speak” and now have a dog who yaps at me while we’re clicking training just in case “speak” is what I’m looking for – to teach all three dogs to jump into my arms. Payton and Georgie I believe can do this easily. Auggie is the only one I’m not sure about. He can jump higher than I think, as he has proven while running up to agility practice jumps that are set for big dogs and taking them in his excitement before I can reset them to his jump height (I believe 22″ is the highest he’s done) – but I’m not sure if this is really something he can do for me given his physical limitations. It might be a “jump into my arms as I kneel” trick for Auggie. We will work on it, and hopefully will be able to finish our last agility runs together and wrap them up with that trick. (And hopefully my eyes won’t be so full of tears I will miss catching him!)

So that’s our plan this week! Keep working on “grab the bumper” and start “jump into my arms.” No clue what to call the latter one yet. “Don’t kill Mama?” “Don’t throw out my back?” “Careful, Mama is still increasing her bar weights at the gym?”