Riverside Lesson

We got a last minute email from Joan last night saying she had a cancellation today, so we jumped on it.  Jonah was a little slow to warm up but he had many moments of greatness.  Here are some highlights of the lesson:

-His teeter was kind of slow, and he fell off once when it bounced hard on landing.  He was never afraid to get back on, he just never ran on it.  I'm not sure I can blame him considering how loud it is.
-He had great off-side weave entries, and he weaved quite fast.  It was a 12 pole set, which he hadn't done in a little while.

-The A-frame was slow, as it has been recently, until we worked on a running contact.  I've been wanting to do a running A-frame with him for a while, so I was glad when Joan recommended it.  We set a jump a stride out so he had to go up, come down and collect for the jump.  This worked great and he was running up and over by the end of the lesson.

-We had some difficulty with a tunnel/dog walk discrimination.  Jonah was really going for the dog walk and I really had to pull hard and call his name to get him into the tunnel.  I'm thinking I should do a bunch of work on dogwalk/tunnel discriminations at home once the snow melts and we get our dogwalk back up.

-Jonah's dogwalk is getting a lot faster.  It's super fun to watch.  He's really driving up and over now.  He still slows down some for the down ramp, but that means he never misses his contact!

-Sometimes when Jonah does his 2o2o contact he sits down on the ramp.  Joan wants us to work on getting him to stay standing.  We should be able to do that indoors with our mini-box (basically a single step that he does his contact position on).

-He was really cruising through the lines of jumps and he would drive out ahead of me to the table.  Good boy.  He loves jumping.

-We worked some on getting him a little more obstacle focused by basically shaping a jump, where I'd just look at the jump and reward him when he would go take it.  I moved back farther and farther away from the jump until I was about 15 feet away from it.  He thought this was a great game.

At the end of the lesson Joan got out the measuring wicket and I just played around with it for Jonah to get more comfortable with it.  He was nervous about it even without a scary environment.  Poor guy.  Hopefully at our next trial he won't be so scared.  It should be the last time we have to get measured for CPE (our second measurement after his 2nd birthday).

This is a good week, because we get to go back for another lesson tomorrow!