Day 8

Sorry to not post yesterday. It was a day off and we used it to mostly chill out, get to know the dog better, and relax. Plus it was Mother's Day. :-)

Class today was about how to teach tasks specifically tailored to the recipient. This could include getting a drink from the refrigerator while the recipient remains in another room. Many of the male recipients over a certain age were very interested in teaching their dogs this particular sequence! We were far more interested in teaching the "Go to Miles" command sequence, so we will begin work on this in our advanced training at home. We also had the opportunity to put some of our problem solving skills into practice by working through various challenges set up throughout the facility by the instructors. Some involved using commands and tasks that we had worked on last week. Others involved a specific problem that we had not yet encountered in class. For these tasks, we had to figure out how to train the dog to help solve the challenge.

The dog also had a quick trip to the vet for a check. It was nice to see the staff keeping up with the health of the dogs as others had quick checks as well. Everything was fine and the dog was back in time for our field trip to Meijer. For those of you not from the midwest, Meijer is similar to a super Target. We traveled around the store playing a game where each recipient chose two tasks for the dogs to do and we rotated around the group. We were also interacting with the public (some shoppers didn't seem too happy to see so many dogs in the store), but we had no problems and our dogs were very well behaved.

Big adventure planned tomorrow. The next field trip is to Polaris Mall! We had a brief preview as part of our day off... And we will try to take pictures tomorrow. Both of us were working so hard today that we didn't have time to take any!