First: can you find the puppy in this picture?
Anyway, we are settling in with Jolie, who has learned to go into her sleeping crate voluntarily, sleep through the night, and run. While these are all wonderful developments (and the last one is especially adorable), I can’t help but notice that there is a trade-off involved: she no longer wishes to walk.
I don’t mean that she is reluctant or distracted; I mean that she plunks herself down on the pavement and simply refuses to budge. We’ve tried everything, but the only thing that seems to work at all is to carry her for a block or so, after which she is usually fairly happy to oblige.
But not always. Here she is yesterday, after being carried a bit:
Sometimes she’ll come running if we crouch down (although she’ll sit down again the second we stand up and try to walk), but yesterday she wasn’t even buying that:
But Nick finally got her to come over…some victory, right?
The thing is, we are trying to tire her out, so that might have something to do with it. After Nick fell asleep with her on our bedroom floor (on his birthday, no less!) and had to drag himself into bed at 1am (he wakes up at 6:15), we became very, very interested in keeping her active during the day.
And I think that she’s getting a little sick of it.
“How do we know if she thinks of us as dominant?” Nick asked. Everyone says that establishing dominance is the most important thing in raising a puppy, but we find that, with our puppy at least, success is a tricky thing to gauge.
She rolls over and offers her belly to us, which is a good thing, but she mostly just does it because she knows that we’ll rub it for her. And she’s completely capable of ignoring our shouts of “No!” if it’s something she really, really wants to do. And if you haven’t looked at the photos above to see what trying to walk her is like, you really should do that now.
It’s tough to balance the fact that she needs to learn the rules and respect us with the fact that she’s a baby still. She’s not allowed to nip at us, but we’ve started to notice that she mostly just does it when she wants us to sit on the floor, so that she can haul herself up onto our laps to take a nap. And while sometimes her walk-time stubbornness is just that, at other times she begins shaking like a leaf and crying, and we are reminded that the world is enormous and frightening to her.
I thought that it would be easier to accustom her to being outside either early or late, when the streets were empty, but the thing is that she loves people. If we can get her to the fruit stand a block or so down, she’ll jump up and start lavishing attention on the two men who work there. If someone passes us, she’ll run after them, hoping that they will be charmed enough to stop so that she can sniff and cuddle. Since she’s so remarkably tiny, they tend to do so.
My lingering awareness that she is, for all intents and purposes, peaking in preschool would be bad enough on its own, but all this flirting troubles me for other reasons as well.
“Do you ever get the feeling that she wants to be owned by pretty much anyone else other than us?” I whispered to Nick after ten minutes of pleading with her to just walk was abruptly ended when she leapt up to trot after a passerby.
“Kind of,” he admitted.
We know that it’s not true. It’s our feet she always comes back to hide behind, and our legs she clambers up on when she’s sleepy, and our chins she licks like a little possessed thing when we are running downstairs with her when she’s woken up.
What’s harder to shrug off, though, is the feeling that she is running the show.