Saturday, May 22, 2004

Wow, Mojo must have poo'd a record, both in times and amount. He also ate around 1.5 cups of Eukanuba, now that his food is 'pure.' The puppy is a machine...a pooing machine. It's like he's dumped more than a pound of poo, and was going every 3 hours or so. Maybe he was getting the rest of the Blue out of his digestive tract. Maybe he just got that loving feeling. But this pace is unsustainable.

The two-pad system seems to work pretty well. We have two pads upstairs, two pads downstairs. That way he can pee on a pad then poo on another. We discovered that he only does one at a time, and for obvious reasons he doesn't want to use a recently-used pad for whatever he does next. Thus two pads per spot. He has problems, though, if he poops a volume of stuff. If he thinks it'll take more than one sqat he tries to arrange it so each squat is in an area of one pad that won't interfere with the other sqat - so he'll poo on opposite corners. If he doesn't know, then he poops in the middle of the pad, then he's screwed. Well he's not screwed, he just moves over and poops on the floor. It's unclear whether he actually knows he's over the floor or not, and there's really no way to tell what he's thinking. We haven't caught him enough times to see if he's got a sheepish/guilty look.

Luckily this hasn't been a problem today, because we've always been around. We're going to be leaving him home alone tomorrow, so this will be an issue. Strangely enough, he almost never thinks of going downstairs (or upstairs) if there's no space. He'll go down or up if he thinks we're watching him (for privacy), but won't do that for space reasons.

So we'll put down three pads and see what happens.

The other thing of note is we taught him to stand up. So when he's sitting or lying down and you want him to stand, well, now he does. What we can't figure out is how to get him to stop. For example, if he's running, how do you get him to, well, stop? Especially if he's off-leash, which he isn't...but he's getting stronger and pulling it out of our hands every once in a while. Plus he seems to like jumping off of sidewalks, which is a dangerous habit. Maybe we'll do that one before 'heel.'



Friday, May 21, 2004

Well, Mojo's gone back to Eukanuba full-force by eating a whole bowlful of it. Maybe they lace it with Puppy crack?

We'll try one or two more times, and if that doesn't work then we'll stick by Eukanuba. The only candidates left are the "Chicken Soup" stuff, used by some of the Hav list owners, and Innova.



Mojo's about 21 inches from nose to behind...tail not included. He's also 16 weeks and a day. Amazing that he's been here for 9 weeks.

Yesterday he met the neighbor's cat. The cat lives with a dog (bo/beau, if you remember) so it wasn't intimidated/freaked out by dogs. It was sitting on its stoop, waiting to be let in...a perfect time to introduce Mojo. Mojo sniffed it, and didn't quite know what to make of it. The cat sniffed Mojo, then went back to waiting at the door. Mojo kept sniffing it, then sniffed its butt to try and figure out...something. I got Mojo to 'leave it', but he kept looking back with this "what the heck was that" look. I was wondering if the cat was going to smack him, actually - that would have been funny to watch.

We're also thinking of switching away from Blue to another dog food. Mojo's stool is bigger, and he does it more often, which seems to mean that there's less digestion going on...less absorption? Well basically, more poo with the same volume of food means that something's not being absorbed. Also Ela thinks his coat isn't as nice as it used to be. She also said he's kind of got a minor itch on his paws, which might be a low-level allergy. Maybe Innova?

Mojo's ear color seems to be a darker shade of cream now, almost reddish. Wonder why?




Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Mojo's head seems to have grown a bit. Maybe it's the haircut?

The Blue/Eukanuba mix is doing weird things to Mojo's bowels. He poos more often, and more, with the mix than he did with just the Eukanuba. The poo starts out firm, then gets kind of mushy. Whatever.

We discovered that Mojo likes slides. There's a small playground nearby, and just for fun we put Mojo on the slide. The first time he was a bit dazed, but then he wanted to go back up and do it again. He slid down 3 or 4 times, and seemed really to enjoy it. It was funny to watch, because he slid down with his legs sort of bent, as if he was surfing.

He also got to experience an exercise ball, which we pulled out. He barked at it, sniffed it, then we tried to get him to do dog tricks with it. First we tried to get him to stand on it, which was a total failure; he'd just jump off. Then we tried to get him to stand up and push the ball with his front paws, which was sort of successful. We'll work on that one for a few more weeks and see what happens.







This is his new haircut. It doesn't look quite as obvious in pictures, and thankfully the effect is almost gone now. In real life, his head really does look like a helmet. Notice the hair on the upper muzzle is gone, mostly.

Well you can't notice it because there's not enough contrast. Anyway...








Last note: no bowlegs on this guy. You're supposed to check when they're wet, since you can't really see anything through all that hair. Yep, they're straight.

One thing: during his bath, he was able to jump out of the tub. The tub didn't have any water in it at the time, so now we know he can standing jump around 2 or 3 feet. That'll cause all kinds of problems :|




Did you know dogs had nictating membranes, like cats? Neither did I. I noticed this a few weeks ago, but just looked over at Mojo and his eye was open, showing his membrane. just thought I'd write that down.



Oh, I was thinking yesterday that Mojo seems a bit short. I said something about it to Ela, and now he looks short to her too. Then at puppy class, Riley's mom said something like "wow, he's short."

I measured him at around 8-9" high the other day, which means he's within the breed standard. Wonder if he'll grow any taller? He was also around 25-27" long from tip to tip. It seems long to me now, maybe I'll try another day and see.

Lastly, the fur on his tail is pretty scraggly. I'm not sure what's up with that, but it looks like the branch of a christmas tree...at the end of the season. The breed standard says "The tail is high-set and plumed with long, silky hair." Mojo's is all that, minus the long silky hair. Maybe it'll puff out when he gets his adult coat, which should be at around 9 months or so.




I think Mojo's favorite toy right now is a sock. He really loves fetching them, playing tug-o-war with them, and soaking them with slobber. In fact, I think Mojo would be happy to never have a new toy again, as long as we kept him in socks. Plus they're interactive. It's hard to interact with a chew-toy. I can't very well share it with him. But I can tug and throw socks.

We gave him a bath today, with just water & conditioner. He looks good! Then Ela gave him a haircut - and cut away most of the hair around his eyes. For around 20 minutes he looked really, really strange, because he had helmet head and, well, eye-sockets. She fluffed up the hair on his muzzle, and now he looks mostly normal. Hopefully the haircut will prevent all those little hairs from poking him in the eye and causing the tear-stains.

He's learned a bit how to get hairs out of his eyes. When something like that happens (a hair lays -across- his eyes), he'll sort of paw at his face the way a cat does, dragging his front paws over his head and down towards his muzzle. It works, but I think he only does that when we notice there's a hair in one of his eyes and start messing with the area around his eyes.

One thing I learned today is how strong his jaws really are. He sits on my desk during the day, and he's gotten into the habit of chewing on the pens. (Ela would say that I taught him it was OK to chew on pens). Well I had this big pushbutton plastic pen, and today he broke off the pushbutton end and was chewing it like gum. I wasn't too worried, since he hadn't swallowed the other parts of the pen he had broken off. Well I reached in and tried to get the pen top out of his mouth. Bad idea...one of his teeth came down on my thumbnail, and wow did it hurt. Maybe he can't now, but when he's older he'd probably be able to get his teeth right through my thumbnail. Ouch! So I don't feel so bad about his biting, which is mostly under control now. He's going easy on us.




Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Mojo graduated from puppy class today! Whoo!

Unfortunately, he celebrated by taking a poo on the bath mat in our bathroom. Boo, hiss. We try and keep that door closed most of the time, but it was open tonight and well, there he went.

Besides that, Mojo was great. He played with Riley during the puppy class, and did his thing in the 'graduation excercise.' We tried to see if he'd play with Jenna, the black lab, but Mojo was quickly overwhelmed by her - in about 1.5 seconds. So much for playtime with the big dogs.

Still, Mojo & Riley played for a long time. It was really fun to watch, so we'll be scheduling some play time for the dogs. Whoa, how weird, huh? Dog play-dates.

And I've come to realize that every time I talk about how long ago the last 'accident' was, and how Mojo's been so good about the bathroom, something happens. Sigh. After class I was joking we should put up one of those signs, like they have on construction sites: "no bathroom accidents in __ days." Guess it's time to reset that counter.

Oh well, maybe next week.



Nothing much happened yesterday, so no entry. Today, though, Mojo got his first watermelon rind!

Ela was in the kitchen doing kitchen things, and she had some rinds left over. She gave him one, just to see. He stared at it for 2 minutes, and during that time she was saying "take it, take it." She then turned away. When she looked back, Mojo was gone. She didn't hear anything - no chewing, no feet on the linoleum. He had gone, like a thief...with a mouthful of watermelon.

She found him under the green ottoman. He was eating it quietly, and when he saw her he looked up as if to say "please don't take it away." Instead, she brought him out and took some pictures! Yum Yum!
















Sunday, May 16, 2004

Mojo learned a new trick today - play dead! We just go bang! bang! And he falls over - or rolls over, depending on how he feels. We got it off this list of tricks:

Movie Dog Tricks

He really doesn't like doing anything besides sit. Tell him to lie down and he grumbles. Tell him "bang bang" and he probably won't do it...unless there's a treat involved. When you say "speak," he will make a noise most of the time - if you wait long enough. I guess he's "pay to play" too.

A weird thing happened tonight. For no apparent reason, Mojo went downstairs and sat down in our entryway. We couldn't get him to stay at the living room level - if we brought him up he just went back down. If we sat down at the top of the stairs he'd come up and say hi, then go back downstairs. Then about 20 minutes later he was back upstairs with us, all normal. Who knows?



Mojo has a new game! We've been playing it for days, but this is the 2nd time I've written about it.

Basically, the game is fetch...I take a bunch of rolled-up socks and throw them, and Mojo chases them and brings them back to me. Then he either drops it (then we keep throwing socks) or we get into a tug-of-war with it. Yeah, it's just fetch, but it's fun! Consider that only a few weeks ago if we tried to get him to fetch something he'd just look at us, as if to say "are you going to get that?"

He also can use his nose to find us, if he's not too lazy. If we do a hide-and-seek, the first thing he does is look at all the places we've hid before in the room he's in. So downstairs he looks behind the chairs, on the chairs, then behind the TV (not sure why he does that). He looks downstairs towards the front door, the does all that about three times. Then he goes upstairs to check.

Maybe his sense of smell will become more primary in his later years, but for now he's very sight-dependent.

He also knows the names for certain things. We realized that he knew what things were when I threw something and I accidentally said "get the sock" and instead of chasing that thing he went and got a sock! Our dream is to get him to do a "find the keys" thing, where if we lose something we can ask him to find it and bring it to us. The other trick we read was for the dog to go to the fridge, open it, get a soda, close the fridge, and bring it to us. Unfortunately, Mojo's too short to reach the soda :(



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