Yesterday didn't go so hot. I'd slept in after Aaron left for work, and awoke to find Marcus chewing on a pair of my shorts. Normally when I sleep in, he doesn't need to go out until noon at the earliest, but yesterday his bladder decided 11:45 was good. The UPS truck was near my bedroom window, and he kept running into the bedroom, barking once, then coming back out to the living room. He doesn't really bark at the UPS truck, so I went into the room to make sure nothing else was up. I came back into the living room to find him peeing on the vacuum (which is the one thing he is absolutely, positively terrified of). After apologizing to him (I felt terrible for making him wait), I took him for a walk. but I only took him for 1 walk, and he's used to 2-3 before I go to work, so he didn't want to get in his crate. While Aaron and I were at work, we discussed some things with our morning routine. Specifically, since Marcus is crated away from us all night, he seems to really, really want to play at 7am in the morning. I work til Midnight. That's not so good with me. We decided that there was no real reason for him to be created at night. There's not much to destroy in our bedroom, and we're both there. We sleep with the door closed. The problem was, we've established that he's allowed to be on the bed when he isn't in his crate.
Insert an hour of trying to train "down" with positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, when he did down correct, he got so excited about it he wanted to jump on the bed again. We finally resorted to jingling a bag of pennies when he jumped up on the bed.... and after two attempts, down was learned. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful. He jumped up at 6am, and we ignored him, and he went back to the floor. And he didn't whine to wake up until 8:30 (typically, he's very reliable about needing to come out of the crate at 7am). Unfortunately, today was the ONE day we forgot to set the alarm clock, so it would have been nice to have him wake up early... but what can you do.
Marcus wasn't out of his crate like a shot at 7am, so I got a much more casual start to my morning. It was a rather nice day out, so I decided to take Marcus out for a nice long walk. The park is a mile from our house, and I'd like to not have to drive there all the time, so I've been walking on building Marcus' stamina. It was not too hot out since it was still early, and there was a nice cool breeze. We made it the whole 1.3 mile journey there with no incident! Yay!
The way back was a bit rougher, as once the sun was up, it got quite warm. I'd brought a bit of water with me, but Marcus didn't seem to want any of it, he just wanted to sniff things and pee on things. I don't necessarily know that he realizes that if he doesn't drink, he runs out of pee to mark with. I finally got him under a nice shade tree, where we had a nice drink, and Marcus tried to eat grass.
Then Marcus decided it was time to run home. 2.6 miles of walk for the two of us, and when we got home, Marcus was the happiest little guy. He should sleep QUITE well tonight! I'm glad that after yesterday's kind of crummy day that we were able to make up for it today. This weekend's adventure - toenail care with the dremel!
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