So. Much. Fun.

We had our weekly lesson today and Jonah was, quite simply, awesome.  We got there a little bit early and Grace gave us the opportunity to warm up for a minute.  I appreciated the chance to school dogwalk contacts.  The first two times Jonah blew the contact just like he's been doing in trials.  After that, though, he was dead on.  He was taking the dogwalk at quite a brisk pace, maintaining the speed down the ramp and sticking that contact for all he was worth.  Good boy.  He was then 100% in our courses later on.

Our first course ran smoothly except one place where he should have turned left but turned right and back-jumped before I realized what was happening.  I'm not sure why he did that...it was a sharp slice of the jump and turning left would have been much easier.  However, I stayed by the first stanchion for a mini send, so I guess he thought he should get back to me rather than continuing his motion.  I'm not sure how to practice that other than setting up the same thing, which I just might have to do.  Our second time through the course he missed a jump right up next to the wall.  I didn't support it and just took it for granted since he'd taken it the time before.  The other dogs in class had trouble with it too.  We were wondering if, because it was so close to the wall, they were having trouble with depth perception and losing the white bar a little bit against the white wall.  Anyway, I shouldn't take things for granted even if he's running great.

We aced our second course beautifully.  There was so little I would improve.  We challenged ourselves and did a tough rear-cross weave entry and a decent lead out from the table.  Everything was so smooth and fast.  He was really eating things up and was super attentive.  What a good boy.  The second time through the course he was weaving so fast that I 'woohoo-ed' before he got to the end and he popped out at pole 10 looking at me like, what's wrong, mom?  I should hold my excitement for the end of the course, I guess.  Other than that he was still pretty phenomenal.

Our last challenge of the day was to do the same opening of the course but then to handle the dogwalk contact at enough distance to handle two jump wraps to the weaves.  It looked like this:

So, basically, I had to be on the far side of 2 while he did his contact independently.  I wasn't sure that he would stick the contact with that much distance, and he did turn towards me, but he kept those back two feet firmly on the board until I said OK.  I was so proud!  After that, the jumps and weaves were easy and we were done.

The only other thing of note for the day was that his table was shaky.  He would not go straight into the down.  I practiced a few times after class and I think I just need to keep schooling it before the USDAA trial.  Other than that, though, I couldn't be happier with Jonah.  I did better this week, too!