Pre-Thanksgiving

Work has been taking up a whole lot of my time lately.  We also have been crazy getting the house together, as we had Dave's family here for a pre-Thanksgiving meal this weekend.  It all went well and the house is getting to be in good shape.  I have had time to spend with the dogs, but blog time has been on the back burner.  Oh well.  Here's a sense of what's been going on:

1)  Nika and Dave are about half way through their Attention class.  They work on footwork for Obedience, heeling, and that sort of thing.  I don't have any plans for her to be in obedience, but it's good for her to be in class.  The neatest thing of this session is...

...her litter mate is in the class!  I might have to come one week to see her.  Dave says they are clearly sisters--the other is slightly bigger and has more white, but I guess they look a lot alike.  So cool!

2)  I had to miss agility class this week.  The week before was a lot of fun and Jonah was running really well.  He's such a star.  This week is Thanksgiving so there won't be class...so much lack of agility!

3)  However, we have been doing some fun things at home.  I don't have any contacts up, but here are some of the exercises I've put together:

I did this with Jonah this morning, and it was fun.  Lots of ways to do it.  I think it worked best when I pushed to backside from my right and then took off, picking him up on my right again.  I guess that's a Ketschker, but I don't usually do them quite like that--this time I kept my hips always facing pretty much in the same direction so he crossed in front of me and then spun around behind me.  Fun.

We also played with 180s and threadles with this setup.  Good practice, with 3 basic jumps.

With Nika, I kept the same setup but did the more logical order, just like a little circle.  She was excellent and I could get some decent distance, staying in the middle.  I was also able to get in front crosses between 2 and 3 or on the landing side of 3.

I wanted to do this setup with Nika for rear crosses, and she was quite brilliant with that, too.  I'd start at 1 with her on my right, then have her run out in front of me at 2 (still in the circle direction, so the back side of 2 on the map), and then I'd pick her up on my left for 3.  First I just did the rear cross at 2, but quickly we could do all 3 obstacles and she was fantastic.  She's so much fun.  So fast, so drivey.

We've done some other setups, too, but I'm going to try to tire the dogs out some more before I head to work.  Here's for lots more fun in the coming days!