Adventures in Taco land

I'd say for being new puppy parents we are doing pretty well. It has been 4 days since the last accident (and before that it had been 7), Taco now knows his name, can sit and stay and come pretty well (sometimes he just looks at us stubbornly though, like what do you want to make me do?) and generally, everyone is very happy!

There are a few problems or 'issues' as Cesar Millan would call them.

First of all, The Walk. The oh-so-important walk is oh-so-difficult! I understand about the calm assertive energy and I actually tend to use it in the classroom with my students. I find it's important not to get upset or frustrated and to remember they probably just didn't understand what you wanted. I think the same goes for the dog, but the dog is a dog. He sees the world through his nose and is a puppy with a very very short attention span. Also, the whole dominant/submissive thing is tricky. As I mentioned above, in the house he does well. We have clear rules for no going on the furniture and no going into different rooms unless he's invited to do so. He has to earn his toys and food by sitting and staying. He can't jump on us or bite, and these are things that he's assimilated well. So I feel like in the house, we're in control. Go outside and it's a whole different ball game. Well the world is just so stimulating, I can imagine it'd be hard not to be distracted. Then again, if he were in the wild as a submissive pack member, he'd just follow us. Right now he tends to follow for about half a block or maybe a block on a good day, and then just start sniffing and pulling. He does his business before we start walking, so I know it's not that. And then trying to stay calm is difficult because I get frustrated about him pulling on the leash. URG! This brings me to my second point:

At times, he goes totally crazy with the leash. He bites at it, jumps and tugs and sometimes even growls. My hypothesis is this is his way of saying 'I've had enough, take me home now', but I'm not 100% sure. We usually correct him when this happens and wait until he is sitting calmly before we start walking again. It's really hard to tell what sets him off though, if it's that the leash was in his way or what.

Anyway, other than that having a puppy is really fun! He is just the cutest thing ever and I love snuggling up to him when he's all tired out at the end of the day. Hopefully these 'issues' will be resolved quickly and soon we will have the best behaved dog ever!!!

I hadn't realized...

I hadn't realized putting curtains up would take so much TIME! We started in January and thought we could put all of the curtains up in one day. We have five windows, so it seemed totally do-able. BUT, we also had our dishwasher delivered on the same day. My husband and dad spend almost all day installing the dishwasher, and we only worked on the curtains for about an hour. We got the rod above our bed up. The next day, we continued in our curtain venture and put up the actual curtains (ironing curtains takes forever!). The following week, we put up another rod and curtains, and now the bedroom curtains are done (hurray!). The weekend after that, we went to Canadian Tire to get a saw because some of the rods had to be cut in order to fit our window width. We spend all day putting up two rods. One day I decided to iron curtains and we put those up on one of the living room windows. And that is where the story ends. We ran out of steam (figuratively) and of the clips that hold up our curtains (literally). This was more than a month ago. We still have so much work to do around the house (condo), but it takes so much time and energy! Last time we went to Ikea to look for more clips, they had run out and told us they wouldn't get more until April! So I guess our curtains will be looking like this for a while now:

Notice the right-hand window lacking curtains...

We still have other home improvement projects that will most likely take forever. I'd like to put some pictures up (I still haven't put my wedding pictures into frames and it's been a year and a half!), I would also like to create a reading corner in the bedroom. And I'm guessing once we know we have some visitors coming, we'll get our act together and make the guest room an actual guest room rather than a 'lets just put everything here' room. So hint hint friends, please visit so we can continue making our house more home-y!