Our Youngest is Growing Up So Fast
Posted on March 7, 2016 by Ching under Babies.
It’s been a while since we gave an update on Saki. She recently graduated from puppy school at PetSmart. She would have finished sooner except we had to move her to another class. We enrolled her in the 2 PM class on Saturdays over the holidays last year. Things were going swimmingly until Brian and I both went back to work and then she started not wanting to pay attention and refusing to perform commands. After a couple of sessions like this, we figured it out. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the commands. It was because she wanted to take a nap. On every single day of the week, 2 PM is her nap time (since she and Molly are locked up in their crates while we are at work) so, on Saturdays, that’s what she wanted to do as well.
Saki started falling behind since she didn’t want to pay attention in class and I was really worried about her. Luckily, there was another puppy training class at the same location with the same trainer, Mike Miller, on Tuesday nights at 7 PM. Mike was nice enough to allow Saki to transfer to that class. They started later so Saki got to review some of the things that she was already supposed to know. The time worked out better as well. Saki was more attentive and she responded to commands a lot better.
I was really worried about Saki but she seems to be turning out okay. In this aspect, anyway. She still has some behavior issues that I’m a bit concerned about. No dog is perfect, though. Actually, no one is. None of us are perfect. We all have our issues.
Molly is kind of a bitch. Well, she literally is; but she’s also a bitch in another sense. When Saki tries to love on her and be friendly, she’ll randomly snarl at her and pick a fight. Most of the time it’s uncalled for but sometimes I wonder if it’s in response to Saki’s attitude. Saki can be a bully. She already knows that she’s much bigger so she likes to pounce on Molly and body check her. Sometimes it’s nice and playful and sometimes it’s rough. I bet that can be annoying to a senior citizen dog like Molly, which doesn’t really do anything to improve her bitchy attitude. It just makes it worse.
Here’s Molly’s adorable RBF.
Saki got spayed last week and I was hoping that would slow her down. It only lasted a couple of days. Even though she’s still recovering, her energy is back in full force. Brian says it comes in bursts now so rather than being super hyper 100% of the time, she has a few moments of calm in between bursts of energy. She still has a lot of energy, though. I’m hoping that she’ll start to calm down because that will be the key to her and mellow Molly getting along.
The dogs usually play with our neighbors dogs, Nikki and Ellie, but we’ve been keeping them apart so Saki can take it easy and recover quickly. Well, the weather was super nice the other day and the dogs missed each other so much they were anxious to play together. We let them and I think Saki overdid it.
We noticed some blood clots in her stitches that weren’t there before. It was probably too soon. No more playing and rough-housing with the other dogs again for a while. They’re not going to like it but Saki just can’t resist being all wild and crazy and she’s liable to hurt herself if we don’t stop her.
By the way, I found this really cool site last night when Brian and I were shopping for a new harness online for Saki. She’s quickly outgrowing the one that she has now. I didn’t want to buy the wrong harness, have her outgrow it, and have to buy another in a couple of months so we wanted to figure out how big she will get as an adult dog. Puppy Chart lets you do that. They have info on just about every breed imaginable. You just input some information such as your dog’s birthday and their last known weight and it will estimate how big they will get over the next couple of years. It’s pretty neat.
If the site’s prediction proves to be accurate then Saki will top out at about 18 lbs, which is perfect for me. I’m not really a big dog person. I was hoping that she wouldn’t get any bigger than 25 lbs. If she stays under 20 lbs then she’s technically still within small dog realm. She’s gigantic compared to Molly but still quite small compared to other dogs. I may just get my wish after all.
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