The Importance of Expectations

Mary-Ann Sontag February 15, 2021

Today the Bright Stars met the Cato Board.

The first thing they did was chew/mouth it. Of course they did — that is how puppies explore the world.

Like human babies, everything goes in their mouths and this includes each other — and the humans.

Mouthing, biting, and chewing is normal and appropriate behavior for a puppy. In fact, it would be a bad sign if a puppy (or human infant) did not put everything in their mouth.

We can no more stop puppy mouthing and chewing than we can stop human babies from putting everything in their mouths.

And we shouldn’t even try — unless we want to raise a neurotic puppy or child.

When puppies are in their Baby Shark phase, we do two things. First, we redirect the puppy chewing to things we can both agree on.

Second, we allow mouthing on hands for the purpose of teaching bite inhibition. It is easy — when the puppy bites too hard, we shriek. This conveys to the puppy: OUCH!!!!!!! If the puppy continues to be rough, we do the mother dog thing — and this may surprise you…

When a puppy is playing too rough or generally being unruly, a mother dog simply leaves. That is it: she just removes herself from the puppy.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Mother dogs are kind to their babies.

Littermates also educate about bite inhibition. When a puppy is too rough with another, we all know it and the offending puppy gets the message.

Having realistic expectations of puppies, dogs, kids, each other — and ourselves — is so important. We create frustration and disappointment when we fail to have informed and reasonable expectations, and nobody deserves to live with all that.

The other new thing with the Bright Stars is a crate.

At nighttime, all items are removed from the puppy areas for two reasons. First, it is safer that way, even though Dear Husband continues to be up with them overnight. Second, we want the puppies to understand that we sleep at night and play during the day (except for Dear Husband, of course).

The Moonshadows have new items today as well.

Titan: Can I tell you a secret?

Buck: Of course.

Titan: I weigh two pounds today!

#gotitan

Have a terrific day!

Evening Pics

Puppy Love Day

Mary-Ann Sontag February 14, 2021

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Check out what I got from Berkeley.

She is not even 4.5 years old.

I am reminded that when kids live an intentional, thoughtful, informed, and enriched life they are able to flourish and excel.

It is not so different for puppies, except they are unlikely to send written Valentine’s Day notes.

I love thinking of ways to enrich my puppies’ lives/environment. It is fun and I know it matters.

Rosebud is part of the puppies’ enrichment activities.

There is a tension — a sweet spot — between not enough stimulation and too much. If we under-enrich, we fail to push towards potential and lose opportunities to hardwire in positive ways. If we overdo it, we cause puppies (and humans) to shut down and risk unfortunate hardwiring in the developing brains.

Sirius and Heze with Miss Piggy 2-14.jpg

Miss Piggy was new today, and the puppies noticed and interacted — very cool. That is Sirius and Heze.

Novelty is important and so you will rarely see the same things with the puppies two days in a row. Because they grow and change so quickly at this age, even a two-day break from something gives it back some novelty.

Raising puppies in this intentional and enriched way doesn’t matter to everyone and that is perfectly fine; there are breeders for people who just want a puppy — or better yet, please rescue a dog or a puppy if early life experience is not critical to you.

My goal is always to place puppies with people who value and appreciate the informed and intentional way we raise puppies because it means those new homes will continue the efforts when they assume responsibility for the puppy’s life and welfare.

The Moonshadows are starting to play with each other…

Nova Jr.: “Will you be my Valentine, Miss Piggy?”

Have a LOVEly day.

Evening Update

I love this photo. Neil and Arch on a tolerant sibling.

Moons and Stars (Updated)

Mary-Ann Sontag February 13, 2021

The Moonshadows were — well — MOONED!!

Thank you, Anonymous Friend, for mooning the Moonshadows and making us all smile :)

Pozy, exercising her prerogative as the Big Sister, promptly stole one…

This seems like an opportune time to apologize to my Perfect Sister for stealing her clothes — except I might not be sorry for stealing the Good and Plenty shirt because I really did love that one.

Sometimes I cannot tell which puppy is in a photo — I take hundreds of photos each day and sometimes forget to also get the collar. And so the above is a mystery but below is Ariel.

Titan continues to grow into his mighty self…

Hunter doesn’t really need a collar — he arrived with his own flashy white bling…

Buck is in the green and black collar.

My daughter called this morning and wanted to know where the present from Nova Sr. was and I explained that I was late in posting since my daughter called to chat. Dear Daughter is not the only one awaiting the big reveal.

Puppy Nova is named for a Bright Star human, Nova, who lives in Minnesota, as I have explained before; human Nova is now known as Nova Sr. since she was the original Nova in the family.

Nova Sr. is known far and wide. Toby, who lives in Pennsylvania, has a friend who teaches an online tricks class. The friend/trainer told her class about the twenty Berner puppies (ahem — ten plus ten!) and long/funny story short — imagine the trainer’s surprise when she learned that one of the ten plus ten puppies is named after her student, Nova! Small world indeed.

Kris O. is also involved with Nova Sr. and will be doing agility lessons with Nova Sr. and her puppy, Hattie, who is a cousin to the Bright Stars.

So, Nova Sr. got a Bright Idea and TA DA!!!!

That is Nova Jr. on the teeter made and sent by Nova Sr.! Isn’t that amazing!? I am telling you — that girl is going places, and when she gets there she can team up with the girls who live with Wildflower, Lucy, who send me the best videos! I want to hold a Camp just for all the great kids in our community right now. But I digress…

Nova Sr. and her family need to do consultation for IKEA because their assembly instructions were fantastic — I had it together in no time at all. In fact, I think it took longer to get it out of the packaging than it did to assemble.

The new teeter offers a lovely object lesson. When training puppies and dogs (and humans), we must break things down into manageable pieces. So the end goal is the whole teeter experience but we will start with teeter as a tippy board — all agility peeps know that this is an ideal first step in training a teeter.

So much gratitude to Nova Sr. (and her parents) for helping with enrichment for the ten plus ten puppies so they can grow up to be as amazing as Nova Sr. (aka Super Nova). Some agility peeps back east are — no doubt — thrilled to see a teeter with their future puppies at such young ages.