More pics of Teal

The first three picture are of Teal eating lunch on March 7, 2009. That is her 15 week birthday. One day I will do a sequence of all these photos, but for now you can see that she has gotten a little taller and a little longer than the last time I posted.
She is shaping up to be a very good puppy. She does have a demon inside her, but she is learning to repress it when needed. She has learned to sit very promptly and consistently. She does lie down very quickly, but I usually have to give her a little hand motion for that. She is also learning left-spin and right-spin but still needs treat encouragement. I am going to start teaching her left-paw and right-paw, and hopefully that can lead into looking right and looking left. She also know to get in her kennel on command and is getting pretty dang good at leave it.
She knows to tug when I tell her and when to drop it too. It was easy to teach her to drop it because she usually wants me to throw the toy again as quickly as possible. We are working on get it and bring it, but she usually just does those things on her own. She is also a good little dancer if you entice her with a treat. Right now I am most excited about teaching her to jump over a slat on the ground and quickly jump back. The point of this is to teach her muscle memory that will eventually lead into a very good box turn for flyball. I will put some videos of that up so and people can give me feedback about her motion.
The other great thing about Teal, which I have encouraged, but is mostly just her personality, is her love of people. She doesn't care if it is a big scary guy with a hat, a little kid or tiny old lady with a walker- she wants to jump all over everyone. She usually ends up on her back begging for belly scratches. I am keeping up my rigorous socialization routine because this is such a great quality and I only want it to get better.
All in all she is a really good, cute and fun little puppy.


These are pictures of her first time out in the field with me. She did great! She followed me all around for the whole day and never complained about being tired. She did get a lot of breaks as we drove from site to site, but she was still a trooper. She negotiated some pretty serious obstacles for a little puppy- jumping over logs, crawling through dense brush and climbing steep embankments. It was fun to have her out there with me, and since she stayed so close to me I didn't have to worry about keeping track of her. I think she is going to end up being a good little woods dog.