Puppy Training.

Training a dog is time consuming, but rewarding.  You don't have to spend an hour at a time in a training session; in fact it's best not to.  We spend little sessions of 10-15 minutes a time with Brienne and we consistently reinforce behaviors at random times, like sitting before meals and such.

Here are some of the things I have learned through trial and error while training Brienne:

Clicker Training:
This is something that I (regrettably) have just now started.  To do this you must first "load" the clicker.  "Loading" a clicker is quite simple; what you do is click and then treat.  Repeat this until your dog looks at you expecting a treat when you click, that's when you know he or she gets the idea that clicking means there is a treat to come.
Clicker training allows you to reward in a more timely and consistent manner - you will get faster results with this method.
You don't have to buy a clicker, you can use a Snapple bottle cap (or any cap that pops when you push it), or you can simply say "yes."  But you still have to "load" the system before it becomes truly effective.

Lure Training:
Lure training is awesome for training sit, lie down, play dead, roll over, and a whole host of other tricks.  The concept is simple: lead your dog into the position you want by holding a treat in front of his or her nose.  Click or reward at the right moment, and repeat.

Discouraging jumping:
If you're an owner of a large dog like we are, you'll appreciate the importance of having your dog greet with all four paws on the ground.  Brienne is 66 pounds of furry love and you better believe she comes at you with full force - there's a reason we call her a truck dog.  We have children in our home quite frequently, so this behavior is unacceptable.  It's all in the name of puppy excitement, but 66 pounds is a lot of weight and she can do a lot of damage pretty quickly without meaning to.  I've done a lot of searching, no, scouring of the interwebs to find a solution to this, and I've tried several approaches.
Let me tell you right now kneeing your dog in the chest doesn't work.  Not for us anyway.  It might be because hubby wrestles Brienne during playtime, but whatever the reason kneeing her encourages the jumping.  So that idea is out.
Having your dog on lead is a good idea in general.  This way, if you have unexpected company you can step on the lead to prevent your dog's front paws from ever leaving the ground.  Do make sure to leave enough slack that your doggy can look around freely.
What we're trying now is behavior conditioning.  It seems to be working better than the above two methods.  What you do is confine your dog with a baby gate or puppy play pen before your guest enters your home.  You and your guest cannot pay any attention to your dog until he or she quiets.  This can get difficult if your dog is anything like Brienne; she gets loud, and I mean loud.  Resist the urge to tell your puppy "no" because any attention is inadvertently rewarding the behavior.  Once he or she is quiet, praise quietly (clickers are great for this) and give treats.  Give lots of treats for any relaxed behavior like what I call a "butt-flop."  Butt-flops happen when your doggy is lying down and his or her bum moves to the side so that his or her hind paws are no longer directly under his or her bum.  Eventually the association between guests and excitement will fade.
The hardest part about training your puppy not to jump is asking other people to comply.  I stopped taking Brienne out for walks because people on the creek path would stop and let her jump all over them.  When I asked them politely to discourage her, they would usually reply with something along the lines of, "oh, I don't mid if she jumps on me."  Yes, but  I mind if she jumps on you.  Once the stranger replies in this way, there's really nothing else to be done because if I insisted that she not jump up, the stranger would generally get offended.  I will never understand why, all I was asking was for my training efforts to be respected, and I was asking nicely.  Ah well.


Those were the major things I wish I'd picked up on sooner.  Just thought I'd share them with ya.

Puppy Lessons.

Having a puppy has taught me quite a bit about myself.  The most important lesson in the myriad of learning experiences is that I am not a puppy person.  I love dogs, and really all animals, but having a puppy is something else.  I won't be doing it again. 
The most annoying lesson in this whole adventure is that I am not in control of my temper the way I thought I was.  Particularly in the morning before the wee one and I take morning nap.  It's all well and good to say I'm in control of my emotions, but applying that to trying to catch a puppy for twenty minutes in the freezing cold is a different matter entirely.  That situation is infuriating because Brienne thinks she's playing a hilarious game while I'm fuming angry with her.  The other day I scolded her for ten minutes once I finally got her inside.  Because dogs can understand English... 

I'm not proud to say that I've smacked her with things.  Most notably the brand new (to me) shoe I had just brought home from Goodwill.  After nursing the baby to sleep for bed I got back up and found that she had grabbed the shoe off the back of the couch and decimated the heel and toe.  I was beside myself with anger; I had been really happy to find some shoes, dangit.
I feel like a little person when this happens.  I should be better than that.

So I decided to channel my frustration into a guide for anyone who maybe needs help with their puppy, or dog.

First of all - and most important:
Do not use negative reinforcement.  This does not mean that you can't tell your puppy "no."  This means that you shouldn't do things like shove your puppy's nose in their pee/poop while potty training, or smack the dog with an item you don't want them to have.  Why?  Because smacking your puppy with an object he or she is not supposed to have teaches them to be afraid of you.  The punishment is connected to you and not the object.  For this reason, if you shove your puppy's nose in an accident they just had, you're teaching them that pottying in front of you is bad which can result in poop eating (dispose of the evidence) and ninja peeing.  And no one wants a ninja puppy, because walking into a room and stepping in puppy pee is very unpleasant.  I wish, in all the things I read about potty training, this explanation had been provided.  Instead, everything I read said, "don't do this!" without going into the consequences of actually doing it.

Remind yourself as much as you need to that a bad behaviour is simply the result of lack of learning, or some kind of reinforcement.  In no way does a puppy spite you.  There is no thought process in dogs that says, "I know my owner dislikes this, so I'm going to do it to tick them off.  That'll show them!"

If your dog is not doing something you're asking - like coming when called - take a moment to think about why.  Rarely is this the dog's fault.  Here are some potential reasons, using the example of coming when called:

• Your puppy doesn't know the command yet.
• You've called your puppy to you to punish him or her.
• You've unintentionally punished your puppy when you called them.
  Brienne won't come if there's snow on the ground because if she comes inside, the fun ends.
• If you're not in a position to enforce the command and your puppy chooses to ignore you while he or she is still learning.
  What this does is teaches your puppy that the command actually means nothing, so no response is need on his or her part.

There is no need to use force when training your dog.  Restraint (like being on lead) is another matter entirely, and is probably better than total freedom in the beginning.  I'm talking about shoving your puppy's bum down when asking them to sit.  A simple way to avoid this is by lure training.

Don't scoff at clicker training.  A clicker is just $2 at Petco, and can be a really useful tool for timing and consistency when teaching a new command.

Have a baby gate, crate, puppy play pen, or some other means of confining your puppy to certain areas of your house.  This is handy for training a puppy how to properly greet guests, and to generally keep them from mischief.

One of the more important things to remember is that until your puppy is 100% reliable in all environments and situations, have them on lead.  Not only is it embarrassing when your puppy runs away and refuses to return, it's not safe.
If you're not confident in your puppy's recall command, don't take the chance.

On a related note:
We kept Brienne on lead inside for a long time.  This helped tons with potty training and other situations (like greeting, and Halloween trick-or-treaters) by allowing me to keep her near me at all times.  It also did wonders for my stress levels because when I sat down to nurse the baby I wasn't spending that whole time wondering where the dog had gone off to, and what mischief she was getting into.
Alternatively, you can use a puppy play pen.

Get a training lead!  We have a 50 footer, and it is great for playing fetch and teaching various things - especially come when called.  The idea of going to a dog park is less intimidating now, because I know I can have some measure of control over situations Brienne might get herself into.

The Golden Rule to any dog - especially an untrained one - is to be patient.  It is way easier said than done, but it helps if you don't project your emotions onto your pet.  Like I said before, your puppy doesn't hate you, he or she just doesn't know better.

The Silver Rule is consistency.  Patience first, then consistency.


Here are two youtube channels that have helped me immensely!
Zak George
Tab289

Kitty Update and More.

Vincent went to the vet yesterday.  I lost the battle with the abscess(es)... The day before I took him hubby found a second abscess on the wound under his arm, the one that had already healed.  I guess I just don't understand how abscesses work.  Anyhow, poor kitty has a plastic cone and he was real loopy for a couple of hours after the visit on account of being sedated.  He hates the pain meds they sent home, which is sort of a given whenever you're dealing with treating animals: they hate the meds.
The vet sedated him, reopened the abscess on his outer arm and stitched the opening that had appeared overnight on his inner arm.  She also tested him for Feline Leukemia and FIV, and gave him an antibiotic shot.  Apparently she also clipped his nails (something I just now noticed as he's sitting on me).
I was told to keep doing the Epsom compresses and to clean the outer arm wound with hydrogen peroxide.
Contrary to what my roommate says, I am not to give him any infant ibuprofen; cats do not process any of the human painkillers well at all.  It can be fatal if given in too high of a dosage (says the vet).

In other news:
The second appointment with our midwife was yesterday also.  I came away with four more books to read, a Chinese Gender Chart (I'm having a girl according to it), some handouts on useful topics, and an assignment to create a food journal for at least five days including a weekend.  I got to hear Baby's heartbeat through a stethoscope which is infinitely more awesome than an ultrasound in my opinion.  And she taught me how to feel where Baby is with my hands.
This is a pretty awesome (to be redundant) experience.
I was sad that hubby couldn't make it, so I tried to schedule next time for a day he'll be able to come.

I rediscovered the public library a month or so ago.  A week or two after that I figured I'd see if they have the books I'm trying to find in circulation.  It turns out they have only one: Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church - Ranke-Heinemann.  It should be a gem: "[Catholic moral theology] is a folly that invokes God and pretends to be religious.  It has warped the consciences of many men and women.  It has burdened them with hairsplitting nonsense and striven to train them as moral acrobats instead of making them more humane and kinder to their fellow human beings." -Ranke-Heinemann
That's on the back cover.
So we'll see how it goes.

Kitty Drama

Recently my cat was injured in a fight with my roommate's cat.
He left with a puncture wound (the size of a pea) in his underarm and what appeared to be a small cut on the outside of the same arm.
I am determined not to go to the vet for it.

A friend of mine and I tried to stitch it up to no avail, but the puncture wound is healing nicely.
The small scratch on his outer arm is proving to be the problem now.  A couple days ago the skin around it filled with liquid and when hubby pushed on it, Vincent growled.  He then proceeded the lick the crap out of it and the next time I saw him he had a set of puncture marks on the outside of his arm and it had drained.
This means the wound is trying really hard to get infected.
So now, I'm doing warm/hot Epsom Salt compresses and keeping it super clean in hopes that I won't need to kill our pocketbook to help fix him up.  It seems to be working.

I am keeping a very close eye on it to make sure it doesn't get any worse.  If it gets worse he is certainly going to the vet, but I'm hoping he won't need to.  He's handling it very well when I torture him with soapy water and sticky bandages (which I'm pretty much wasting).  I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm the one doing it and he's in his own territory.
I'm hoping to keep it that way.


So now you know how stubborn I am about any sort of medical system.  I'm determined to find another way, until there is not other way.
On the same note, I'm not insanely stubborn.  I'm capable of recognizing when I cannot possibly do anything else; when outside intervention is necessary.

I'm just of the opinion that outside help is less necessary than people perceive.

Honey Bees and Projection Screens.

Bee Love (redbud tree)

Hubby and I went to Grand Junction for Easter weekend and it was pretty awesome to be out of town.  The weather was beautiful (it was also beautiful in Denver) and we spent some time driving around doing various things.  On Saturday the honey bees found the tree in the front of my parents yard.  Their tree is very similar to the one pictured, but has slightly darker blossoms.  The honey bees love it; they were working from late morning to early evening collecting goodies to take back to their hive.  There were so many of them!  Almost the entire top of the tree was covered in honey bees with about three to four blossoms between each of them.  And the sound.  The sound they made was amazing.  All of those bees working on a single tree created a fantastic hum.  You could hear it form inside the screen door, but if you walked outside it was much louder, and much cooler.  It was an experience, to say the least.

At any rate, today I'm writing about projecting yourself onto others: what I was supposed to write about yesterday, had I not been up at three in the morning.

How many times have you caught yourself expecting others to behave the way you behave?  If you're a parent, your answer is most likely higher than those of us without children.
I catch myself doing this a lot.  I mean, a lot.  I slip into the foolish expectation that someone else will treat me the way I would treat them, or have habits similar to mine.  This is easy to do with a lot of things.  I forget that world view is different for everyone.  Sometimes I think, "well it was easy for me, it'll be easy for you."
I feel like this is an error that a lot of people make.  And I do try to correct myself, though sometimes it's quite a long time after the fact that I realize that's what I was doing.
The mistake of projecting something onto another person is simple to make, and it's hard to understand that this is what's happening in a multitude of situations.  The problem is the difficulty level of thinking like someone else.  Thinking like someone else is next to impossible for most people because you can't turn off the you in your brain (at least I can't).  It's extremely difficult not to perceive something with your own special bias (I'm not using this word negatively here).  Because of this we come upon the fallacy of Relativism. In some respects this theory is true, and in some respects it is false; like anything else, it cannot be blanketed over everything the way people seem to want to use it.

People also project onto animals.
This is why you see dogs that are ill-trained, or animal hoarders.  Someone has projected their emotional distress in some form onto the animal present, and the result is sometimes disastrous.  This is true of projecting onto other people as well.

I'm not saying projecting yourself onto someone else is particularly a terrible thing; what I'm saying is that it can cause problems.

The most frequent example I have of this in myself is my lack of understanding for others misunderstanding.  It is so clear to me why I joined Catholicism and why I'm preparing to embark upon the journey into WAPF, it should also be clear to you, the person I am speaking with.
But it is not always so clear to everyone else.  And in my limitations I get frustrated with those who refuse to even acknowledge that perhaps my choices are right, though different from theirs (I am also guilty of not understanding someone's choice, but I try to be nice about it).  In my frustration I find my articulation suffers and I become somewhat stubborn, sometimes very stubborn.  In the end (if the discussion is particularly irritating) I wonder, "why can't they just see my side of things?"  But who's to say they're not thinking the exact same thing about me?
I have my reasons and I try to explain them, but I rely a lot on the assumption that since they were logical to me, they will be logical to someone else.
The common error of projecting my logic process onto the person I'm speaking with.

It's also irritating to realize that someone else has been making assumptions about you based on their own emotional baggage.  The kind of assumptions that are totally out of left field and really don't make any sense if they actually knew you (or were actually observant).
The "up" side is called rose colored glasses and is a term applied to people who are blindly in love with someone, or just intentionally ignoring their faults.  The "down" side doesn't have a name to the best of my knowledge - I might call it seeing red or something similar - and is the opposite end of the spectrum where someone refuses to see any good qualities in someone.

~~~

I'm sorry for the lack of activity last week.  I'm trying to write when possible, but this eye strain is really kicking my ass.  I should make an eye appointment but I can't do that until after September, when I'm not a pregnant lady any more.  At least that's what they tell me.
Until then I'm going to make my best effort to obtain Hubby's glasses so I can sit and stare at the screen for a while.  The difficult part is he doesn't get home from work until around 7:30 p.m., then we eat dinner, then I'm tired and I want to go to bed so I can get up at 5:30 a.m. the next day to work for 9 hours.  It's a viscous cycle, but I don't think I'd change it.  I'll just have to try and work around it.
And try I shall!
I apologize for the potentially sporadic updates that may follow.

~~~

I leave you with this.  Enjoy.

I May Have Gone off the Cliff.

I was at Ross yesterday with the specific intention of buying new sheets for our bed.  Any time I'm upstairs in the particular Ross I go to I have to look around and see what's on the clearance racks, or on the baking/cooking aisle.  A lot of times I leave with cutesy cupcake pans featuring shapes such as Easter eggs or hearts.  This time I managed to avoid the baking/cooking paraphernalia and headed straight to the clearance rack.  On the way there I was side-tracked by a shelf of journals; I've been looking for a new journal for a while now.  These journals happened to have religious quotes on them, and I happened to leave the store with one that said, "Nature is the art or God," or something along those lines.  I also acquired the specific sheets I was looking for and a pizza pan/serving stand set.  All for around $65.  The journal accounted for $4 of that.
I was excited to bring the journal home, intending it to be a prayer journal my husband and I could use together.

I haven't written in it yet.
Or told hubby what it is for.

In an interesting series of non-events my mood changed (pretty rapidly) from chipper to sulky.  And then to angry.  And then I cried.  And then I was back to angry because nothing had happened to provoke any of it.
So after trying to calm myself down with my nightly yoga - which worked until I was finished with the yoga - I went to bed and fell asleep.
That is why I didn't tell hubby what the journal is for; I'm apparently losing control of my emotions.  It turns out that that is quite distracting.

I do like the idea of the prayer journal.  Although sometimes I think I'll feel weird when I'm writing in it, but I won't be able to tell until I actually make an entry.

~~~

I read a book about intuitive communication at work: the security guard produces books for me to read when I tell her I'm bored.  These books are always books that I would never pick up myself, so it's interesting to read them.
At any rate.
This book was about intuitively communicating with animals.  Or, being an animal whisperer.  I started off really skeptical, wavering pretty sharply between the idea that it was possible and totally dismissing it.  Then I read more, and more.  And by the last quarter of the book I was convinced of most of it.  There are still things that I doubt, but through curiously trying the exercises outlined in the book (it was sort of an instructional work) and actually having a fairly high success rate, I'm pretty convinced this is real.
Actually doing this is a lot like praying, except it feels different.  I realized around page 85 that intuitive communication with animals is almost synonymous with praying to God.
The basic idea is you talk to the animal as if you know they can understand you and respond themselves.  When you pray, you talk to God as if you know he is listening and will respond in a way he sees fit.  The difference here is you don't pray to the animals, you have a two-way conversation with them (once you've gotten good at receiving information).
I tried this with my cat Vincent before the convention at the beginning of March.  My roommate had been gone all day and her cats had been locked up for that time in her room, with no litter box.  Vincent usually follows me downstairs if I go - especially if I open her door to let the cats out for any reason - and the three of them don't get along.  If he was going to follow me, there would be no litter-boxing for Caspian or Sphynx.  So I stopped and patted Vincent for a second, then told him that I would appreciate it if he stayed upstairs while I let the other two out to use their litter box.  I went downstairs and Leeloo followed me, so there was no litter-boxing anyway, but Vincent stayed at the top of the stairs like I had asked.
I have several stories similar to this, and I know that to an outside perspective it sounds like coincidence, but it's interesting to see the change in behavior if you just speak to your animal the way you would speak to a person.

I got a little off topic there.  Ahem..
I meant to say that the book made me sad when I finished it.  We're so disconnected from nature now, and I think it causes more problems than we realize.  Nature really is God's art, and we should really take more time to appreciate it in my opinion.
Which is why the article in the Post about the Lorax made me want to laugh, cry, and punch someone simultaneously.  The article was about how the movie the Lorax was creating "Occu-babies."  By teaching children to appreciate nature it was somehow anti-progressive.  I haven't seen it myself, and I didn't read the whole article - just enough to figure out what "Occu-babies" meant - but I'm pretty sure some appreciation for nature couldn't hurt.