Maximus the Pretty Puppy?!

It has been a while since our last post! Lots of new stuff to blog about! I'll start with the most exciting!

A very good friend of ours has gotten into a new hobbie of photography with photography classes, high-end digital camera, Adobe photoshop, basically the whole shabam! Anyways, we invited her over and she took some glorious photos of our little Max, which she posted online on her website (the photo above is one of them and one of my favorites). Well, what happened was is that the administrator of a website called the Daily Puppy found those photos and asked to have Max featured on his website for a day! So Maximus was the featured puppy on Monday of this week. That would be February 19th, President's Day! I had to write a little tidbit about Max for the feature! Here is the tidbit I wrote (which mimics this blog a bit!):

Maximus's mom says: Maximus is our little dog with a big name. Max, as we like to call him, loves to socialize with people, children, and other dogs. He is about ten weeks old now and rarely barks. Even when other dogs howl and bark, Max takes it all in stride. He does whine a lot but we often find his whining too cute! His temperament is very even keeled and laid back for the most part. This little furball has been a big bundle of joy for us. Both my fiance and I are engineers and typically spend a lot of time in front of a computer at work and, unfortunately, at home as well. But ever since Max came into our lives, we have spent much more of our free time playing with him outdoors in the backyard, walking him around the block, and training him. We feel so much healthier as a result. We can't wait until his ears stand up because it will be oh so cute. Typically when this occurs, only one ear will stand up, then the other a short while later. When this happens, as fun and cute as this will be, we will be a tad sad that this part of his puppyhood will be over.

To see the actual feature article, follow this link:
http://www.dailypuppy.com/index.php?itemid=897

You can even vote on this site and give biscuits to your favorite puppies... so far (as of today) he has:
10.73 biscuits - 1679 votes!!!

This is more than any other puppy I've looked at on this site! (I've only looked at the first half dozen or so!)

Also, life training the little bugger has been tough, especially since within the last week or so, which includes the holiday weekend, there has been more rain than shine it seems and it is really tough to get Max to go out in the yard to do his doodies. Hopefully, we haven't created any long lasting habits! We probably should train Max to do this doodies on newpaper during these days. In any case, rainy days are tough since he seems to regress in his house training on those days.

He has been great with crate training otherwise. He hasn't pooped or peed inside his crate since the 2nd day he's been with us. He's learned our work schedule very quickly and holds himself accordingly. We were quite happy about this! We were thinking at that point "wow, house training will be a breeze!". Yeah, right. Think again! While puppy does not like dirtying his crate where he sleeps while we are at work and at nights, he has no problem dirtying the rest of the house and the yard. Going to be much tougher to train him that their is a big difference to us whether he does his doodies inside the house or outside the house.

Otherwise, lease training puppy has been going quite well. Walking him around the block can take a while since he likes to stop and sniff every blade of grass, every fallen leaf and every little mystery nugget on the sidewalk, picking up a snail or slug here and there to munch on. Every once in a while, he will stop and sit or lay down, either because he is tired or just feels like sitting for a while. Sometimes he wants to go one way and we want to go another and he will not budge unless I follow him... so am I walking the dog or is he walking me?

We started listening to Cesar Millan's (aka the Dog Whisperer) audio book. He has a lot of good stuff. He really knows and understands dogs. A lot of people out there really don't know dogs. He can really show you how a dog sees the world and his owners. Understanding how dogs see things really helps in knowing how to train the dog. However, I have found that knowing and doing is still two very different things and not so easy to do. He talks about being the alpha male and being calm and assertive. I think I have no problem being calm. I can be assertive if I am in the right mood. Being an alpha male, I can do to some extent. Most of the time, I like to go with the flow instead of taking a stand and being stubborn. If that means the little puppy wants to walk one way and I want to walk the other, I will often let the puppy lead the way because I don't care that much either way. This is definitely not good though, because I think this puppy is starting to learn quickly how to walk all over me. I should write a note to myself, like on my hand or something "be the alpha male!"... kind of like that guy on that movie Momento.