February Syllabus

One month down, eleven to go, and I’m thinking I bit off a bit too much for my 2010 goals.

Fine. A lot too much.

The problem isn’t that I put too much stuff on any one dog, it’s that I need to do all those things with both dogs, as just about everything you see on my Weekly Worksheets needs to be done in duplicate.

The weather hasn’t helped, either. All the Citizen stuff was a total washout (literally) as we’ve been pretty drippy out here, and while my boys don’t mind getting wet, I do mind them getting everything else in my house wet.

As I contemplated February, I realized a choice had to be made. I could either revamp my schedule (roughly planned out through May) to take into account what I learned this month, or I could charge ahead full steam and see how many walls I could plow into before the month is through.

I opted for Full Steam Ahead. If I’m going to go down in flames, I’m going down in style. Most of the things that I didn’t finish in January were moved to February, making the shortest month of the year look a wee bit cramped.

I did push Training Levels - Level Four Watch out to March, as I can’t work on it until I finish Level Three. I dropped Level Three Crate since both dogs are quite comfortable in their “home” crates and this is more a technicality of filming than anything they need to actively work on. As watching a dog sleep in a crate is akin to watching paint dry, this whole task might disappear into the ether.

( On The Road Crate is a totally different story, as that requires the travel crate and Zachary is not nearly as comfortable in it… but we aren’t quite there… yet. )

Canine Good Citizen is a Good News/Bad News scenario. The Good News is that the Canine Good Citizen class got rescheduled and now we can actually go. Yeah! The Bad News is that now I can’t strip those items out to try to slim down the month.

On top of everything else, I added items from my two new Electives, Photography and Dance. That’s not quite as foolhardy as it may seem as (a) I’m having a great time photographing the dogs and I would do it anyway, and (b) I’m going to pick the Dance items that help out my Leash Manners and CGC requirements.

Field Trips hasn’t changed – It’s a nice mix of activities and I don’t see any reason to muck with it at this juncture.

And finally, there’s Just For Fun. As last month’s activity came from The Helping Paw, this month I picked a pure Trick: Balance cookie on nose. This is a blatant effort to help me catch up as (a) it’s a really easy trick and (b) Beau already knows it!