Happy snow dogs, lemme tell ya!
Day … whatever of Life Without Facebook and I don’t miss it at all 🙂
Finally the snow has come for the winter and hopefully more to come – my dogs were BORN for this, they LOVE it!
Even Gina sheds her normally stoic exterior and becomes a nutcase in the snow!
A little quiet around here with husband away, but we’re used to it. It’s only really difficult at night – but the dogs like the extra space on the bed! 🙂
Stay frosty!
Another much better night with Azzie after my husband and I made some compromises with her – I came to some conclusions about myself and about the dogs, and about life in general. Very deep, I know – but it happens sometimes.
She slept 4 hours, did her business outside quickly, and then slept another 5 hours right up until the time my husband and I normally wake up – I set no alarms, but let her wake me when she needed to go out. I was so proud of her! I managed to get at least 6, maybe 7 hours of sleep this way, as opposed to 3 or 4. It caused a marked improvement in my attitude and mental state, let me tell you.
She also vomited up the (entire) soft cloth chew toy that she guzzled down 2 days ago, early this morning. I so relieved that it came out in tact, and that it had not caused any damage to her insides.
She grows daily – she is now too large to sleep in her crate and that’s another reason we came to a compromise: she gets her “in your bed” treat ball, and she happily goes into her crate turns around and sits for it. She eats it in the crate, but then is free to come out and sleep where she wants in the bedroom. Surprisingly, this is not always ON the bed, as I assumed it would be. She likes to be able to stretch out, and to find different areas of the room to stay cool. Berners run very warm most of the time (summer is a nightmare for these poor pups) so she spends a lot of her time (And Gina as well) laying on her back with her legs in the air, on the cold tiles. She gets up on the bed only after I’ve taken her down for her loo break (around 0130) and demands cuddles… then gets off and goes and plops down (The Berner Flop) somewhere to get cool again.
I also noticed (this morning) a wonderful improvement in her eating habits – she no longer hoovers the food down, but actually chews each piece and slowly investigates her food toy to make sure she gets all the yummy stuff out. She even LEFT some kibble in her bowl this morning!
She is also taking her treats so much more gently! No longer biting your fingers or shoving your hand halfway down her throat.
There has been a breakthrough in her attitude, as well as mine, I think.
I hope it continues – I will be disappointed, but not surprised, if she has a few relapses. She’s just pup – but she’s definitely starting to show the gentle Berner nature now, in between stubborn fits, of course 🙂
Gina is playing more with her as well. They sleep next to each other sometimes, in the passageway and on the one bed that I put down in the lounge (there is another bed, but Azzie wants to be close to Gina if at all possible – I think this is why the compromise has worked: She feels like part of the family, finally.)
They are BOTH enjoying the snow so much it’s ludicrous! Azzie does head first plowing and flops over and rolls around in it at every opportunity – especially soft powder snow! Gina eats the icy bits and loves to catch the snow if you throw it in the air for her. She is loving the cooler weather as well. These dogs were born for this, and it shows!
Due to some technical issues, I have unfortunately kinda “lost” my old posts and media.
My techno-whiz friend Vanessa (of The Vanessa Macleod Creative Agency ) has done what she can to save my archives (all the way back to 2006!) and they will be available as she gets the chance to import them.
But for now…
It begins again, from here.
So this is my first “proper” post on my new host.
A small update, I suppose, as I try and remember what I last posted about and what has happened since then!
First things first – just over a week ago (Saturday 24 November 2012) my husband and I made the decision to adopt/rescue another Bernese Mountain Dog. She was being moved from foster to foster and was already 7 months old and we wanted to give her a good home.
Her name is Azerenka Victoria – we call her Azzie.
She is a gorgeous girl with enormous paws (larger than a Great Dane’s, actually) and lots of puppy manic energy.
She’s learning fast – very intelligent, like the rest of her breed – but we are in the middle of house training her. Yes, 7 months old and not house trained. She’s from a litter of 11 so she was initially used to fighting for every scrap of food or treat or anything, and she never had her own toys.
She’s come a long way in the week or more that we’ve had her – no more hoarding of toys, no more snapping at Gina when it came to food, no more panicked hoovering of her food to the point where she can hardly breathe.
She’s calmed down, has learned “sit” and “wait” and “uh uh” and “no” and “good girl” and is happily going in to her crate at night.
She has, quite understandably, quite severe separation issues, but we will work on those once we get her house trained – she’s growing DAILY, literally, and soon she will be too large for her crate, so we need to work on the house training first! Right now my husband are exhausted, as we have to take 2 hour shifts to take her downstairs to pee or poop (or both!) – slowly extending the time by a few minutes each night. But it’s slow going – we don’t want to have any accidents, so we go backward in our training with her.
Gina has bonded quite well with her – after the initial posturing and figuring out who is in charge – G is starting to stand up for herself (a lot of that confidence is from playing tug of war with my husband – he goes on hands and knees and uses his teeth like a dog) and there is no more tension between them. Sometimes Azzie oversteps a bit, she’s a puppy – but Gina very clearly and quickly puts her back in place, without drama. She’s a gentle soul, our G-Girl, and she’s being every bit the “big sister” – including bad habits! But we’re working on that too.
One thing at a time, and baby steps!
Secondly – SNOW! SNOW SNOW AND MORE SNOW!!! It’s WONDERFUL!!! Bloody cold at night, when husband and I do our shifts taking Azzie down… but I’m still enjoying it immensely! My only issue is that my snow boots don’t do well with lots of water – they handle snow fine – so I get soaked, cold feet when we walk out in the slush, or in the wet grass. Meh. So I’m going through a lot of socks!
Thirdly – due to the new puppy and our tiring schedules with her, husband and I have not been swimming, and I have not been running since we got her 🙁 We can’t leave her on her own yet, as she barks (LOUDLY! She has a HUGE bark) and we don’t want her to be a nuisance. We’ll work on that later. I told husband he needs to go though, on his own. I will give him his training schedule and he must just do it. However, with all the snow and icy weather, the roads (especially the very long, steep hill up to the swimming pool) are pretty dangerous, and Helga sometimes gets so cold she doesn’t want to close her door… Plus, husband is so tired from our up and downs at night that he is just not up for it.
We’re hoping that as we get the time extended between pee breaks, for Azzie, we can start finding a bit more energy for other things!