August 31, 2013

A.J. got to meet Sky yesterday. Sky is a dachshund who belongs to A.J.’s Grandma Lucy (my mother-in-law). She and my brother-in-law Chuck are here for the three day weekend and brought Sky with them. A.J. was so excited, he loves playing with other dogs. Unfortunately, I’ve never really classified Sky as a dog.

A.J. immediately started bouncing around, licking Sky’s face, getting into the play dog stance, and barking. Unfortunately, none of it worked. Sky is just not interested in dog play, and definitely not with this bouncy puppy. I had to call A.J. away from him to give Sky a little bit of a break. A.J. continued to try, I felt bad for both of them. I really need to get A.J. to a dog park or play group, I don’t want him to lose his dog socialization and playing.

We had another training session yesterday. It’s going to take such a long time to get him to walk nicely. I was told by our trainer that I shouldn’t take A.J. on long walks anymore because he just can’t handle the distractions, and because he needs to be training the whole time – no just plain walking around allowed. Yesterday I decided to just take him across the street and walk him around the parking lot of the parks department offices. That definitely cut down on the distractions, no dogs over there. This morning we walked past an ice cream wrapper. We had to go past three times before I got A.J. to “leave it” and just walk past. On a scale of one to ten, the ice cream wrapper was a two and a dog is a 45. This is going to take such a long time. And he really, really needs more exercise. Throwing a ball around the backyard just bores him; he’ll chase it a few times then lay down and look at me like “Okay, let’s do something fun now.” So I’m not sure what to do to keep us both from going crazy.