Kaylee often appears happier to see a closet full of shoes than she is to see me.

All Photos © Perfect Paws Publishing

Whenever she saw the closet door open, she made a beeline for it. She looked at all the shoes and wagged her tail like she had found a long lost friend. I suppose it's because her first experience with people as a little puppy was with shoes. Puppies don't look up high enough to see shins or knees. They only see shoes. When they see shoes, it means someone fun has arrived to play, pet or feed them. Shoes mean that soon a human will squat or sit on the floor and generously dole out kisses and praise and treats. And by the way, it's shoes. No one in their right mind would walk into a den of 13 puppies with bare or stocking feet. Puppy teeth are like needles and at least the shoe is a barrier of protection from the attack and onslaught of puppy teeth.

By now she was pretty good during the day but she comes hyperactive at night. She was on the coffee table, then pulling the blanket off the bed, chewing the walls and peeing in the bedroom, all within seconds of each other. And she managed to chow down 3 crickets in the mean time. She didn't even bother to take the time to play with them anymore. She just pounced once and chomp, chomp - down the hatch they went. The grasshoppers were a little more of a challenge for her - it took her perhaps 5 seconds to catch one. They used to seem faster, but her speed and coordination had improved. Maybe those bugs served a purpose at honing her hunting skills.

She loved to squeeze under the couch to reach the air conditioning vent under there. Every day she would run the Doggy 500 madly dashing around the living room, around furniture and ricocheting off the walls. Then she would dive bomb under the couch. One day very soon she will have a rude encounter as her head smacks against it when she doesn't fit under there any more.

She needs some agility equipment soon as she has a strong instinct to climb. From the first day outside she tried to walk on the bricks that give the xpens support. She would walk it with her front feet and try to get her back feet up before falling off.

She was running the doggy 500 around the patio one morning, boomeranging off the patio furniture when she accidentally landed up on a chair. It was her first time up there on her own. She looked shocked that she was up there, and appeared to be thinking "Wow! Look at the view from up here!!"

That afternoon the guitars definitely went up on the wall.

Kaylee now had her own special yard but she couldn't use it for another 2 weeks. We had sod delivered and John and Chloe's dad installed it. Then the area had to be fenced off before she and her sister could run amok in the grass, eat it, roll on it and find more bugs. Dogs love to eat grass and dirt. I had to supervise her constantly to make sure she didn't dig. She learned to dig in the gravel but that didn't seem to keep her interest very long. She would rather chew on, taste and play with everything but her own toys.

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Raising Kaylee  Puppy Training Story Book
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