Walking is wonderful

We did it! Harley and I went out for a walk. We walked for 15 or 20 minutes (closer to 20 I think) around the cul de sac. I didn't want to take him on a long walk distance wise but a long walk time wise. He was all over the place the first 10 minutes. He was biting at the leash, trying to run and doing circles around me. After about 10 minutes though he started settling down. One thing that helped was that I kept him on the street. I didn't let him go up on the grass or near the bushes because he tends to go insane when he goes there. I'm going to take him out again at 12pm. I want him to be tired before I leave for my appointment today.

He went into his kennel on his own and he is laying down. Wow!

I just talked to Betty at Innovative K9 and I'm going to sit in on a class tonight at 7pm so I can check out how they train dogs. They use positive reinforcement and focus more on communication between the owner and the dog. Their goal is for the owner to establish a leader role over the dog. That's exactly what I need. Harley is smart and can do obedience stuff, but if I can't get him under control, who cares whether he can sit or not. It's fun doing the tricks with him (like high five) but I want him to be well behaved and I want him to listen to me at all times. Anyway, I'm just checking it out. We'll see what happens.

Walking him is key to having him be a well behaved dog. If I don't take him out there and walk him, he's going to get into trouble trying to find ways to use up his energy. It's so nice to see him settled down on his own instead of me having to put him in his kennel and close it to settle him down. His kennel door is open and he can come and go as he pleases but he's quite content napping right now.

Harley has really been doing well sleeping through the night. He doesn't need to get up until about 7am or after to go to the bathroom. It's nice that he sleeps through the night. I've tried to let him out of his kennel at night to go to the bathroom and he doesn't even want to come out. So I've stopped doing that and I let him sleep through until the morning. He doesn't rush out when he gets up either. He takes his time and dawdles and stretches before he finally goes out.

While I was walking him he pooped twice and peed once. I of course cleaned everything up. It's trash day so I was able to just pop the bags in the can on our walk around the cul de sac. When we were done with our walk I brought him in and then let him out into the back yard. While he was playing and sniffing the dogs behind us, I picked up the yard. I'm so glad that I'm able to keep up with the yard. There was quite a bit to clean up because I didn't clean it yesterday because of the rain all day. But today it is finally sunny again so I could get out there and take care of things. The clouds are moving in though. I hope they hold off until noon so we can get another walk in.

I'm tired too from walking. Maybe I'll take an half an hour or so and nap too. Then I can take him for his next walk. Just walking him around the cul de sac works out great because I'm never far from home. It makes it so much easier than going a long distance right now. We'll get to that eventually but he needs to behave better on the leash before we start adding in distance. We're just working on duration at this point.

Okay, time for a quick, power nap.