Day 8

A lot has happened on the one-week anniversary of the puppies' arrival into my life.

After work I took them to my friend's house, which is the first place they've been other than White Angel and my house. They played with two new people, a (fully vetted and well-trained) Boxer, and learned how to walk on hardwood floors, which is a new surface for them. They did very well and really seemed to enjoy the interaction with the Boxer and the new people. Brigit even walked up to my friend, tail wagging, and gave her kisses on her face! So they are definitely learning to like new people. She took lots of pictures, so I will post them as soon as she sends them to me (hint hint).

When we got back home, I fed them a can of wet food again, and then offered them water for the first time. I put it in a shallow dish and held it under their heads, then touched their noses and tongues to some water on my finger, and that was that! They immediately started drinking water from the bowl as if they'd been doing it for years! They are so smart and catch on so quickly! So now I'm not sure whether or not to continue bottle feeding. They obviously CAN eat wet food and drink water on their own, but they seem a little young to be totally weaned, and they still enjoy the bottle. I think I'll let them have at least one bottle a day for another week or so.

After their meal, they had their first lesson in bite inhibition. Over the past three days, they have been slowly learning how to play together, and have been getting better at it every day. Today was their first full-on puppy play-battle. They were swatting each other with their paws, biting each other on their faces, ears, paws, and even tummies, and even wrestling with each other until one or the other fell over. But both of them have big enough teeth and are strong enough now that they actually hurt each other at a couple of points during the game. Brigit hurt Siobhan first, by biting too hard on the ear. When S yelped, B jumped back and looked at S for a long time like, "What was that for?" But then a few minutes later, S bit B on the tummy and B gave a yelp and kicked S in the face. For the rest of the game, neither of them bit each other too hard. I had the opportunity to continue the lesson with B when she turned the game towards me and started swatting at my hand. When I reached out to pet her, she playfully chomped on my finger. Of course the bite was so gentle that it didn't even leave a mark, much less feel uncomfortable, but I gave a similar yelp to the one they gave each other and then replaced my finger in her mouth with a chew toy. B took the hint and starting chewing on her own paw instead of trying to come back at my finger. I am really, really glad that they dumped two puppies instead of just one. It's so much more difficult to teach bite inhibition when they don't have each other as teachers!

When they got tired of playing, they wanted to explore. This curiosity about what lies beyond their crate and feeding area is a relatively new development as well, so I let them wander. They both found the bathroom fairly quickly and started ice skating across the tile. After a few minutes' practice, however, they actually both became fairly proficient at walking on this new surface (that's two new surfaces in one day!), and Brigit made it all the way over to the cabinets. B has a little spot of puppy dandruff on the back of her head, and the clever girl somehow figured out that if she rubbed her head on the bottom edge of the cabinet, she could scratch the little itchy spot! As she did so, her back leg began to thump like dogs do when they're ticklish. Seriously...SO CUTE.

And then we inadvertently had our final lesson of the day: as I went to lie down on the bathroom floor so I could get on their level, my knee accidentally bumped the door and the door bumped into the door stopper. It made a moderately loud "bump" and then "boing" noise of the door stopper spring, which startled Brigit so much that she whipped her head around in that direction and started growling and barking (well, the closest thing a three week old puppy has to a bark) at the door. A-ha! Time to start with noise desensitization training! As soon as she calmed down and started to return to her previous activities, I distracted her by offering some water and then gently bumped the door with my foot. Even though the first couple of times she threw a suspicious glance towards the door, she didn't growl or bark again, and by the time I had started hitting the door as loudly as I accidentally did the first time, she was over it. Of course, Siobhan never reacted to the noise to begin with, so I didn't have to do anything with her at all. Still, I'm glad this happened because now I can tell that I am definitely going to have to get creative about continuing to expose the girls to new and different noises so they don't end up with sound phobias. It's no coincidence that on this website about phobic dogs, the picture in the header is a Border Collie. This breed is notorious for becoming phobic, neurotic, and in the worst cases, actually insane if not properly socialized when young and/or utilized when older. But we're not going to let that happen to these girls.

Which reminds me: I know I said in the first journal entry that I thought they were B. Collie/A. Shepherd mixes, but as they're getting older and their shape and coloration is becoming more defined, I think they're actually purebred Borders. Which, you know, is pretty cool, too.