I put a piece of string across each entry to the kitchen about 8 inches off the floor and did some string Zen. That seems to have done the trick. The only people who have been caught by this trap today are me and my husband. In a day or two I'll take the string down and do a bit more runner Zen before I think about trusting it.

Having finished our review of Level 1, we started on Level 2. In our recent water trial, the judge said "Junior Water Dog is all about instinct. Apprentice (the next level) is about self-control". Gee, as we were doing this I was thinking "Level 1 is all about getting to know her. Level 2 is about self-control". Aaaaand… we don't have any ;*D

Level 2 Zen went very well. She's all about Zen (no self-control? Wait for it). I can put treats on her paws, on her muzzle, on my feet. I can toss treats in the air and softly say "no" as they're falling and she'll levitate backwards away from them. I can cue "no" when she's leaping on Stitch and she'll stop.

Yes, even this can be stopped with a single quiet "no".

Level 2 Focus took a few tries to build up to 10 seconds. Apparently there are much better things to look at than me, though for the time she gives, she's locked on. We got 10 seconds, but I want to work it more so she can give it to me cold ALL the time.

Level 2 Come - more distance, come to grab her or put on a leash - no problem.

Level 2 Sit and Down - aha, here comes trouble.

She is, as I mentioned, mixing up sit and down. This is probably because I was so delighted with her ability to do rock-solid downs 20 feet away from me that we practised a lot. Also because while I was away she was thinking about Lie Down, which is our cue for rolling over on her side and playing dead (except for her tail), which she was unable to do on her own when I left and now offers at the blink of an eye.

The bigger problem (not really a problem) is that she has 11 seconds of duration on sits AND downs. Pushing to see what she'd do, I got her once up to 60 seconds by reminding her what she was supposed to be doing every 10 seconds. It was VERY funny. She rolled from side to side. She played dead on her left side, then her right. She put her head down, then rolled just her head so her left cheek, then her right cheek, was flat on the floor. She wagged her tail furiously, then sighed and moaned a little. OK, won't do that again. Level 2 Sit and Down, here we come.

Well, Lazy Leash will be OK… not. She has forgotten how to loosen the leash. HURRAY for the Levels, where we get to actually find out where the dog is, instead of assuming!

Oh, one more thing. While I was gone she thought up something about being groomed (?) or the grooming table (?) that she doesn't like. I went into the dog room with a handful of kibble and sat down at the grooming table. Syn immediately dashed out the dog door. I had to play work Stitch for a bit, tossing treats around the room and praising her loudly, before Syn thought it might be safe to come back in the room. What's that about? Oh well. Work the dog who shows up (however slowly she shows up), not the one you thought you had.

She was obviously upset about the whole situation, but really wanted the treats. I tried calling her and she brightened and came to me, but I didn't do anything with her except hand her a bunch of treats and then go back to looking at Stitch. Syn "escaped" into the living room but soon came back and asked for treats again. Soon she was staying in front of me, so I tapped the grooming table and suggested she might like to jump up on it. Sure, no problem. I gave her a bunch of treats, lifted her down, and went to do laundry. A few minutes later I sat down at the grooming table and went through the whole floor show again. This time while she was on the table, I shaved her butt and face, which she accepted with no trouble at all. I lifted her down and she was fine. Asked her to jump up again, no trouble. Played with her on the table and lifted her down again.

I went away, came back, sat at the table, and again she darted out of the room. Hmmm. Lots of meals on the table in the next week or so...

One thing Syn learned very well while she was alone with my husband - counter surfing, that time-honoured talent of Portuguese Water Dogs everywhere. So hubby and I decided last night that Miss Squirrel should stay out of the kitchen altogether. This won't be an easy task, as the kitchen, living and laundry rooms are all one. There is an island in the kitchen, however, so we decided that she could stay out of the aisle between the island and the kitchen counters, thus anything on the counters should be safe.

That's the theory.

So I bought two rug runners and put them in the aisles. I blotted each one with vanilla and did a bit of work with Zen and a vanilla-blotted rag. Then I drew a line with my finger on each runner and gave the dogs the Zen cue: "You Shall Not Pass".

Right.

Stitch looked at me like I was crazy and clearly decided that since she wasn't interested in vanilla anyway, this had nothing to do with her, so she walked right to me on the runner. I jumped up and down a bit, intoning ACK in my most horrified voice and pushing her off the runner. She went and sat on the stairs and glared at me.

Syn, seeing this exchange, came to the right conclusion ("dogs are not allowed on the runners") and came up with a solution which might have given us both what we wanted (I obviously wanted dogs not to walk on the runner, she wanted to be in the kitchen): she tiptoed daintily in the very narrow space between the runner and the cupboards. She also got an ACK, though it was hard not to laugh.

Maybe I haven't thought this through quite enough. After Syn's ACK, Stitch had to get a toy to calm us all down, while Syn kept asking exactly how far she had to be from the runner to be legal. Later, when I was sitting in the living room, Syn went wandering through the kitchen, looking innocent. When I stopped her she said "But I thought we were staying away from YOU in the kitchen!"

Sigh.

There are 150 pieces of kibble in ⅔ of a cup of Syn's breakfast. That got us through all of Level 1 and Level 2 Zen.

The good news is that she was In The Game, eager to work - I might even say thrilled to be working again instead of sitting around the house having to think of what to shred next - and clearly considered almost all the Level 1 behaviours to be baby steps.

The bad news is… well, there isn't any bad news. She was In The Game, eager to work, and well ahead of where we were working, for the most part.

Still, I'm VErY glad I decided to start again at the beginning. The time it took was very short (one meal), and now I'm sure of what she remembers and what she doesn't. What she doesn't remember is minor but could be a problem later if I ignore it. Being a "mover and shaker", she has a tendency to assume what I want and throw it at me with enthusiasm, without waiting to see if that was, indeed, what I wanted. For instance, in one of the Target behaviours, she has to move 3 steps to touch my hand. For another, she has to touch twice for one treat. I noticed that it's about 3 steps to go from my left side, around behind me, and up on my right side. That's one of the behaviours we're working on with Freedom Dogs to create space behind the Marines, so I decided to use it for one of the Comeafters (designed to help her generalize the behaviour and make it more useful). She was all about touching my hand when it was in front of me, but as soon as I asked her to touch it behind me, she whipped into heel position (WHEE! I KNOW THIS!) so I had to slow her down a bit and get her thinking before she could follow the steps. Also she has forgotten the meaning of "Park". Maybe it means sit, maybe it means down. More often it might mean down, so I have to stop using it for a couple of days, get her offering me sits, and then plug the cue back in. That'll take care of supper…

All in all, she's forgotten less than I thought she had. The basics are there, so we'll be moving ahead again soon.

I've been SO looking forward to getting home and STAYING home for a bit. Not only do I have a lot of work-related stuff to clean up and a house that needs me, but Syn hasn't been worked in weeks-and-weeks. To make matters worse, for a month or so before I left we were working exclusively on competition behaviours and not on Levels behaviours. Oy, I bet we have work to do!

I got home last night. This morning for breakfast we did a little semi-testing to find out where we are, though I have every intention of running through the behaviours right from the beginning of Level 1 to REALLY find out where we are.

Yep. She's eager-eager-eager to do something - anything, in fact. She's apparently been getting bored with shredding every shredable object that wasn't nailed down (and a few that were) in the dog room and the small outside pen while I've been gone. Paper towels - fair game. Shampoo bottles? OK. Bathmat? Yeah, that's reasonable. But a RUBBER BOOT? What kind of maniac shreds a rubber boot?

So Come, Sit, Down, and Squirrel (our heel cue) look pretty good. Lazy Leash has gone to pot, but I knew that after I started showing her in conformation. It's the duration behaviours that have really suffered. Sit Stay? 1 second. Down Stay? 3 seconds. Eye contact? Using half her breakfast, we got that up to a fairly solid 6 seconds and one 9-second offering. Holding the dumbbell with me is gone - she tries to tug it out of my hand. When I hold my hand steady and won't let her move it, she gives up immediately.

No worries, just some backtracking to be done.

On the other hand, we started a new beginners agility class this evening (though the class has been going on for 3 weeks already). Oh my GOODNESS!

I had to close the door to the building three times before we were able to walk in on a loose leash. Syn clearly recognised the place from her baby puppy class and was eager to get inside.

Once in, she had a momentary flashback to that first set of puppy classes when she was scared of the dogs, but she met a few friendly ones and her tail came back up immediately. She was very happy to see the people.

We started with running through a channel of weave poles. I'll be using 2x2 to teach her weaves when she's old enough (18 months, maybe), but I don't mind if she runs through channels a few times in class in the meantime. Neither does she. The helper and I had a slight miscommunication. I handed her my bait bag, thinking she would put down a target plate and put some treats on it. She thought I wanted her to put the bait bag down, so that's what she did. Syn went through the channel like a little brown rocket, grabbed the bait bag, tossed it a couple of times, and then brought it to me! She got a little jackpot for that.

Since the bait bag worked so well, we used it some more. Each time Syn was very eager to get it and brought it immediately back to me. So she DOES remember retrieve, just not the holding part.

Stays were a bit better in the class than they were this morning at home (we weren't practising stays in class, just me trying to get away from her a bit).

She remembered her go-around work and cheerfully went around jump standards (which looked like going over jumps to the rest of the class) and the tire.

I think I've decided on having her lie down on the ground at the end of the A-frame and dog walk as her contact behaviours, so we practised lying down after a very low A-frame. When we moved to a very low dog walk, she really got going. The helper was putting five or six pieces of kibble on the ground to slow her to a stop at the end, and she was FLYING. At one point, she went about 4 feet up the ramp, jumped the rest, clearing about ⅔ of the up ramp and ⅔ of the down ramp, did the bottom 4 feet of the down contact, and ate the kibble on the floor. This dog is going to be FUN in agility! I used Look to get her focused on where she was going, Watch to get her to focus on me while other dogs were running, and her awareness of what works and what doesn't to teach her that she had to go the whole distance on the board even if she thought going on the floor would be faster.

Where she really excelled, though, was on the pause table. I stood 5 feet back from the table, cued her to Go To Mat, and she ran for it, folding up her legs into a down even as she was landing on the table. Clever girl!

In short, we had a grand evening. Class was fun, Little Miss was a Synsation, and I can see Training Levels in everything she does during class. The next few years are going to be SO FUN.

Syn, Stitch and I spent the weekend at a water trial - daring stuff for September in Alberta. There was a practise scheduled for Friday, but when we woke up it was 5 degrees above zero with the practise due to start at 9. I used my 10 minutes at the site to play with Syn on land, toss the bumper for her on land, and walk several times around the ring. The first time around, I let her sniff and explore. The second time around, I got her attention and asked her to watch me and pay attention, and rewarded her by tossing the bumper. That went very well. She was cheery and enthusiastic, willing and happy.

By the time it was Stitch's turn, it was considerably warmer and I asked her to go in the water - well, that's a dumb idea and why would she want to do that? We went out on a boat and she willingly leaped off the boat, but it was clear she wasn't there to enjoy water trials.

Saturday morning, pretty chilly but doable. Syn was first on the line. In our 3-minute warmup, we did another round of sniffing the ring, another round of paying attention, several dry land retrieves, then she and I waded into the water and did a couple of very short (4 foot) bumper retrieves - just enough to get her wet and get her swimming.

The first exercise was the 25-foot bumper retrieve. She jumped out after it, stopped momentarily before getting more than her feet wet, looked back at me, but hopped out after the bumper when I told her to go on, got it and brought it back. Good good pup!

The next exercise was a 120-foot boat ride. She hopped up on the boat platform and stayed on it while I sat down. It was pretty wavy and the rower was fast, so the platform was wobbly. Syn wasn't happy enough with the feel of it to lie down for more than half a second at a time when I asked, but sitting up was acceptable. Hop off and walk back to shore with me - excellent.

Third, I left her alone (ALONE, ALL ALONE, NAKED AND COLD, SOLO, SINGLE, A-LOOOONNNNE) on shore being held by a steward while I went 60 feet out in the water on the boat (MOOOOM! DON'T LEAVE ME, MOM!) and called her to come into the water and swim to me, then climb up onto the boat. Umm, no problem with that one.

Finally, she had to swim 120 feet beside me, wading in from shore and walking out with me when we were done. Also no problem. And as we left the water, we heard the judge say the magic words "That's a Junior Water Dog!"

She was also entered in Apprentice, the second level, but was clearly not ready for it. It involves a lot more distance, stays instead of being held, etc. Apprentice is certainly not above her ability, but she definitely needs a bit more than 3 days' practise to get it. That's OK, I'm thrilled she got Junior, I didn't really expect it. When she appeared unable to perform a task (like a long retrieve), I went out and helped her. Even so, and I think partly because of the cold water and the fact that, as a pup, she has no blubber to keep her warm, I aborted the performances early because she started thinking that running around would be more fun and less trouble than doing what I was asking her to do.

Stitch, OTOH, was equally clear that even though she has done the Working level in the past and has the title, she was not prepared to do it again with 3 days' practise, nor was she prepared to do it in cold water. I'm pretty much of the opinion right now - considering her performance a couple of weeks ago in Rally and her performance this weekend in Water - that from now on she can do her REAL job (Service Dog), which she's good at and likes, and a bit of agility now and then, which she enjoys, and I'll concentrate my enthusiasm on Syn.