Awesome again

134 days to go...

Well, of course after I wrote that last post we went out and had an utterly brilliant session last night! One of the 'problems' I have now is that Fyre gets SO excited when we are about to start that he spends the first couple of goes bouncing around like a maniac and running everywhere before he finally remembers what he has to do! Not too bad of a 'problem' to have anyway :)

In fact, they were so good last night I decided tonight if they did the first few repetitions ok I would move the two sets of 2x2s closer together. So duly, after the first couple of goes and with a high success rate, I then moved the second set in by 60cm (I am using my weaving rope which is pre-marked in 60cm segments, so this seemed easiest). So they now had a gap of 120cm between each set. I was utterly thrilled when this appeared to present no problems whatsoever. I have cut back to rewarding the correct entry only about 25% of the time now, and rewarding doing the two sets in sequence the rest. I have been able to add in quite a bit of handler motion with both dogs. They can hit some really tricky entries, but we are still working on getting the easier entries from a greater distance away. Admittedly I have spent more time working on the difficult angles of entry than fast entries, but it's only a small thing and I think will be no problem to improve relatively quickly.

Josh still tends to have more trouble with entries from the left (I say trouble, but this is only with extreme angles, like me standing down the opposite end of the poles and he having to go back and 'weave' down towards me). So I will make sure to continue to reward some of those tricky left hand entries for at least the next few sessions. If all is going well in the next few days hopefully I can look to doing some 'real' weaving, moving the poles the correct distance apart and rotating them towards being straight in line.

I have decided to concentrate on 2x2s at the moment, maybe the next week or so, for a couple of reasons - one, because I want to make real progress on this now, and two, I have ordered Susan Salo's Puppy Jumping DVD which I want to use to do a lot of the very basic foundation work with the two dogs before going back to some 'proper' jump grids. I may work in a few games of Touch and Go here and there though, and we did do our first perch shaping session last Friday with both dogs after just a few minutes having learned to stand both front feet up on an old hat box :)

So things are looking up again! Maybe we will be ready for the Nationals after all *lol*