Puppy Visits

This weekend is a relatively quiet one where I get to spend my time visiting with other people's puppies. Seriously, I am that lucky.:) Today I headed south to Silverton to visit with my parents and finally meet their golden retriever puppy, Jazz. They brought him home the weekend I was in Lodi with the dogs. With everything else that's been going on, I just haven't made it down to visit with them and little Jazz. Now that he's already 12 weeks old, I figured that I really better get on that before he's completely grown up.

I took Bess down with me to meet him. I decided to leave Heffner at home for a few different reasons. 1) Heffner does better meeting new dogs when he's by himself. 2) Heffner isn't terribly fond of male dogs beyond the age of six months unless they have a certain temperament and he gets to see them on a regular basis. 3) Since I haven't met Jazz before, I wasn't entirely sure if he was the type of puppy that Heffner would very rapidly lose patience with. Thankfully I don't think Jazz is. However, I'm not entirely sure that Heffner will learn to tolerate him.

Jazz has not met a lot of dogs who are bigger than he is (the neighbors have basenjis and dachshunds) and was rather taken aback when Bess came into the house. For about the first two hours that we were there, he kept his distance from Bess. He was very curious about her, but at the same time, he was a little scared of her. Bess pretty much ignored him and went about stealing his toys that were scattered throughout the house. Initially my dad was the only one home, so we took the dogs outside to potty and maybe Jazz would get a little more comfortable with Bess in a larger space.





After much trailing of Bess and keeping an eye on her every move, we headed inside. Jazz was still skittish around Bess, though he obviously really wanted to play with her. I got out some cheese and started doing some simple sit and down training with Jazz right next to Bess in a down stay. He was much more comfortable around her when she was lying down. He knows sit very well because my parents have him sit for a lot of different things. Teaching him down was a little trickier because his little bum kept wanting to pop up into the air, but he caught on quite fast. I used just basic food luring to get him into position. Then I had him go from a down into a sit, which took a few tries before he figured that out. In the mean time, he was learning that Bess wasn't so scary and he was more than happy to work for cheese right next to her.

It was becoming very readily apparent that little Jazz was getting very tired after all the excitement of having visitors that he wanted to keep an eye on. I started finding this down by my feet:
And generally, there was a lot more of this:
After a brief nap, Jazz got braver and was going up to Bess, who had stolen his nice comfy bed.
Finally Jazz plopped down and got a playful paw tap from Bess.
In short, he is a very sweet, very biddable, soft, fluffy, adorable little puppy. The cuteness factor is way up there!


And in case you're wondering the toe nail nazi was in effect and I trimmed his nails while I was there. My mom got a chastising for letting them get long.;0)

Tomorrow I am off to play with an adorable little black dane puppy from the litter of Stacie's that I got to go visit a few weekends back!!