PuppyLog

It's snowing this morning!

S_ took lila outside first thing this morning. Lila thought it was great that she could eat stuff that was falling from the sky and much on grass centered ice sticks.

I took her out and kicked the volley-ball around a bit. She is starting to learn to push it around with her mouth and paws. Before today she would run after it and tackle it grunting and growling but after the first tackle she would lose interest. After all, it stopped moving. Today she learned to make it move by herself so she could play longer and not have to wait for me to kick it again. She also learned to move a bit to one side so I could kick it again.

I knew there was supposed to be cold wet weather today and S_ and I are both still not feeling to good. Therefore i thought it best to tire her out as much as possible yesterday so today would be easier on us. I tooke her to the Valmont off-leash dog park towards the end of the day.

It's not a good idea to take a puppy to a city dog park until she has built up a good imune system. Lila has had all her shots and had somt time to recover from them. She has also been introduced to a lot of dogs, people and enviornments so has had exposure to possible diseases in a much less concentrated way than is likely in a dog park. She has also been  pretty well socialized to other dogs in a less stressful way than at the dog park. I don't think whe is in much danger of becoming socially scarred by a scarey experience as long as I am vigililant and keep my eyes open for possible problems. With all that in mind, I ecided that it would be OK to go to the dog park. I checked out all the other dogs to see how they were getting along with eachother before letting her near any of them and it worked out quite well.

She was a bit overwhelmed by all the other older dogs but did quite well. I had to intervine a couple of times when things got a bit too rough for her. She's still quite small and some of those dogs were quite large. She folowed Ipo around a little then got to playing with some of the others. She found a very sweet energetic young Huskey that would let her jump on top of him and play. They rolled around on a while and though there were a couple of intances where she yelped and got a little afraid (this was a 60 pound young adult after all) she was right back at him in a flash.