The busy dog trainer-June

How many of us keep track of our dog training? One thing I have learned over the years is the people that excel at what they do usually keep track of their training one way or another. I am a big fan of quick and easy record keeping. I am going to share with you one way to keeping track of your dog training. First, I make a spreadsheet on the computer. I list the skills for a week that I want to work on. Then, in the columns next to the skills I can place the date that I worked on it & the number of times a day. This helps motivate me to do daily training with my dogs & gives something specific to work on. Now that being said I use this for skills my dogs have already been taught & I am wanting to improve upon. When I teach a new skill I keep track differently because I need to do more writing on that new skill.

Tea Tree Oil

Most of us know that tea tree oil helps keep fleas & ticks away from our dogs but it can also help with another pesky bugger. I'm talking about chiggers! I just happened to run out of my dog shampoo (with tea tree oil) & was using another that had been sitting in the cabinet for a while. Todd & I keep getting chigger bits when we were in the house. I finally came to the conclusion that in years past we had never had this problem because I used shampoo with tea tree oil on our dogs. So, I set our to buy some shampoo & see if I was right. As soon as all the dogs were bathed the the furniture sprayed with tea tree oil & water we had no more chigger bits. The only down side to this is you have to bath the dogs once a week &/or spray them with tea tree oil every time the go out. That being said I live in the country were the dogs get into the tall grass. If you live in a neighbor hood then you are not going to have chigger problems like us country folks. Just thought I would share what I learned this month! -Heidi

The nine month old

Just before Ellie turned nine months she decided to try everything. Ellie started crawling, standing while holding on to things & her first tooth came in. It has been an exciting time! Ellie is keeping me on my toes now that she is on the go. Here are a few pictures of her.