Happy New Year!
As we head into the new year this is the popular time to be making new years resolutions, and I definitely have a few. The first month of the year also happens to be International Train Your Dog Month, so in the spirit of that I am taking time to focus on my resolution to spend more time with my personal dogs.
If you have worked with me you have probably heard me say in the past “the cobblers kids have no shoes” in reference to my dogs and their training. When I was a new baby trainer working with my personal dogs was the absolute joy of my life. No matter how tired I was or how many dogs I had worked with that day I always had the energy to work with my dogs at the end of the day as well. As a result I had an amazing bond with my dogs, and they knew a lot of cool stuff. Adelaide was the last of my dogs to enjoy that energy.
Sadly, no matter how much you want to fight it and tell yourself you’ll be different, having a baby changes the energy you have for your dogs. Even with the best intentions your priorities shift. These days with a toddler to wrangle as well I don’t often find myself with the additional energy to focus on my dogs after spending the day working with client pups. Unfortunately this has caused my relationship with my dogs to suffer. Not only are they just less well trained and responsive to me than I would like, but I feel disconnected from them as well.
It doesn’t help much that during this huge life change my crew of dogs basically changed entirely. Piper and
Goose both entered our family while I was squarely in this new parent phase of my life. Piper joined us when I was about 7 months pregnant, and Goose joined us just over a year ago when we were new to a new city with a very rapidly developing toddler and growing a new branch of the business. Honestly, timing is not my strong suit with these decisions.
To be clear, they are sweet dogs who I absolutely adore and are well behaved 90% of the time. What we are missing on the training side is more about skills out and about in public, and the flashy show off stuff. Adelaide has those skills but they are definitely getting rusty from lack of practice, and the fact that her needs are not met becomes more apparent by the day. But this month we are starting our journey to change this.
You may have heard of the No Missed Days challenge before. It is a training challenge typically and the goal is to miss no more than 4 days in a month of training with your dog. I have decided that, at least for the month of January but possibly beyond, I am going to do an altered version of this challenge. No Missed Days for me means that I will be doing some kind of activity every day with at least one dog. Some days it will be training sessions at home (in which case I will endeavor to work with all three dogs), some days it may be a field trip out to a new location to work on generalizing our skills and building confidence, some days it might be a hike in the woods, some days it might just be a walk around the neighborhood. But I will do something every day. Non-negotiable. It’s time to get my relationships with my dogs back on track and get back to finding the joy in them again.
I hope that you all join me on this journey! You can follow along on the Enlightened Hounds Maryland Instagram account (@enlightenedhoundsmd) where I have been posting daily update videos, and if you choose to do anything similar with your dogs, tag me! Let’s start the new year on the right paw together.
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