Nan visiting!

This weekend my mum came to stay for a few days. She was of course very excited about meeting Senna and had been looking forward to seeing her since we got her. Little did she realise that Senna is no lap dog though:)

Although I had explained to her that Senna is an active large breed pup who likes to sink her teeth into next to everything, like most pups do, I think she was under the impression that there would be a small black cuddly furball awaiting her:)) After the initial surprise they quite took to each other, though mum thought Senna was a bit too much on the active side and kept asking if the puppy teeth weren't due to come out soon:) We went for short walks together and spent most of the time at home with Senna. The weather was rainy and cold so I was quite nice to relax.

Earlier in the week a friend from work brought their mini-dachshund Emmi round to see Senna. It wasn't a huge success though. After having growled at Senna and told her off for wanting to play Emmi settled in Senna's basket, chewing on a ball, not wanting to have anything further to do with the little rascal. I think Senna was a bit disappointed on the whole, though she will have to learn that not all dogs are friendly and want to play.

At the time of writing she's at my feet sleeping after a hard day playing in day care. She's starting to spend more and more time awake during the days the day care owner told us. Also another sign that she's growing up is that there are no more accidents during the night. Now she normally wakes us up around 6, and does her stuff outside. And very rarely does she have an accident in the evenings, only when we occasonally leave it too late does she pee inside. Otherwise she can go 3 hours or more without needing to go outside. Good girl!

Working weekend in Mykyrä

This weekend we went to the summer house again to do some serious outdoor work. We had planned to do some painting but since the weather was rainy and quite cold we had to save that for another weekend and instead we concentrated on stacking the truck's worth of logs that arrived. And a truck load it was...Senna was "helping out" of course snatching splinters of logs here and there and then settling in the high grass to chew on it contentedly:)

Senna was completely exhausted after her first couple of days in day care:) The first day the little rascal had apparently been bugging and bothering the other grown up dogs all the time, running around wanting to play. After having been told where to go on countless occassions by the other dogs she arrived home completely exhausted, sleeping for most of the evening. We even had to drag her out from underneath the bed to go for last pee before going to sleep. The look she gave us was just saying: "oh leave me alone will you". The next day in day care she slept for the best part of the day, too tired to get up to any major mischief:) Let's see how she get's on this week:)

Surgery and day care

This week has been very busy indeed for Senna! Tuomo took her back to the vet since the eye infection she had didn't clear in her left eye. So in the end the vet ended up burning the small growth off and Senna was anaestetised for the first time. She was very groggy indeed and by the looks of it the bladder was nicely anaestetised as well since she made a wet patch in the backseat of the car and on Tuomo's jacket:) Poor girl, but she was very good and the vet gave her the 3-month shot as well, so now she's all clear to meet other canines:) When I carried her into the shower to wash off the pee she could hardly stand straight and afterwards I made her bed with clean cushions and asleep she was...for a little while at least:) Before long she was her old self again, bouncing around the place, re-potting our plants:) Her eye seems to be on the mend and she will probably only have a little bit of scar tissue.

Today Tuomo took Senna to visit the day care that she will be attending on a part-time basis, when Tuomo's mum is unable to look after her. It was her first proper meeting with 3 other dogs, one papillon and two Chinese crested dogs. Apparently little miss self-confident was a bit apprehensive at first but before too long the little tail started wagging again and she had made friends with the papillon. The day care is located on the way from Tampere to Vammala and seemed to be a friendly, small scale place. The dogs are looked after in the home environment of a family who have 5 dogs of their own. Our little girl was tired beyond tired tonight after having played with her new little friends. The day care owner have assured us that they will remove her from the group at times though, so that she can get some sleep in between, since she's still only a baby really:) So exciting times ahead. First day of school for our little girl tomorrow, good luck Senna;)

Senna the office dog!

So there it went. Holiday over. Three weeks just flew by. Since Senna's regular "daycare" (Tuomo's mum) is currently travelling through Europe Senna came with Tuomo to work Thursday and Friday of this week. And a good little toimistokoira (that's office dog in Finnish) she was! Apparently she charmed everyone by being such a calm and well-behaved little girl. Her basket was put into Tuomo's office along with some chews, toys and her water bowl and there she was happily sleeping for the best part of the day, not complaining when Tuomo had to leave her alone in the room for periods of time at all. She's also a lot better in the car nowadays. She now sits by our feet on the passenger's side and feels happy there, sleeping most of the journey.

We started leaving her alone for periods of time in the evening some time ago when she was tired and fed and she was so good about it from the start, apparently feeling secure in the knowledge that we would return. In the beginning left her alone for very short periods, standing outside the front door listening for whining, but nothing. Not a squeak. Now we have started leaving her when she's fully awake as well with the same result. When we return we usually wake her up, so I guess she sleeps through it. Maybe it has been really easy since she was a very independent little girl from the start, not wanting to sleep in our bedroom in her basket, preferring to be on her own in the living room. Generally she's a very confident little pup.

This week I took her on her first bus journey! That was very exciting! We were going to have picnic in the sun with some work mates of mine outside our office. She was really good all the time, being more curious than anything, sniffing around wildly wanting to say hi to all the passengers on the bus. And a lot of people were of course "ooooing and aaaaing" when they saw her:) I held her in my arms the whole trip and she settled down after a while. The picnic was even more exciting. For the first time in her life she met a group of 20 people all wanting to say hi to her! Needless to say she was very excited about all the new friends and their nice food:) I made sure to eat beforehand since I imagined I'd have my hands full trying to stop her from stealing everyone's food and giving everyone a complete facial wash:) I brought her chews and a toy and after what seemed like forever she finally settled in my lap after some persuasion. Needless to say she was already dropping off on the journey back and when we got home she went straight to sleep and didn't wake up until a good few hours later:) Zzzzzzzzz.

Housebreaking training is going well! She now realises that the lift and the landing is NOT part of outside so she holds it until we go through the doors downstairs. Not thinking about the fact that she now knows to do her stuff outside I opened the balcony door yesterday only to see Senna run out to relieve herself on the balcony:) Of course her logic is sound, it IS strictly speaking outside, and that's where you do your stuff:) Clever girl. Silly me:)

This week I have discovered that no fewer than 3 of my colleagues have recently got puppies as well! In addition to Senna there's one Newfie puppy, one Cocker spaniel and one Schnauzer! We are seriously thinking about campaigning for puppy day-care at work:)

Summer's here!

The weather has been incredible the last couple of days, and luckily we made the wise decision to make the most of our visit to Mykyrä and stayed on a bit longer. Since I'm still on holiday and Tuomo works 10 minutes by car from where the summer house is we thought why not stay on a bit longer. And I think Senna thought it was a nice thing as well:)

She was a bit braver this time round, running around a bit more and not staying within sight all the time. Still though, she never strayed from the yard and we always knew where to find her. When calling for her she would suddenly pop her little head up from a bush or from underneath the wooden patio or wherever she happened to be digging right at that moment:) "Yep I'm here, don't worry":)

We had some chores to do as well, including cleaning the tennis court free from moss. And a lot of moss there was...Senna came with us to scrape the moss off, but mostly she was jumping around in the piles we raked up, spreading it around more than anything:) Or she would just lie in a moss pile, chewing contentedly at a particularly nice chunk of moss. But after a while she was tired and followed me back to the house to get some drinks and didn't want to come back to the cleaning. When we returned after and hour or so we must have woken her up pushing the rattling barbecue and she came towards us barking! Then she realised of course:)

We took her for her first boat ride in the rowing boat. She wasn't as impressed as we thought she might have been. I think she thought it was quite a shaky affair indeed and after running up and down the boat a few times, being told that she couldn't jump into the water, she settled under one of the benches under which she could just barely fit. The boat was full of nice sand though so afterwards we had a nice semi-liver coloured flattie:)

Senna did her first bit of hunting down and retrieving dead animals this weekend. She brought us half a dead bird and half a dead something else, undefinable (well, it was furry) that she had dug up from somwhere. Looks promising for the future:)

She also didn't pee inside at all during the nights! Maybe it's because we're able to let her out quickly in the summer house whenever she starts whining, but we were very impressed still. Does this mean that the bladder is finally growing?:) It wasn't to last though:) Last night she more than made up for it with 3 nice pees, (one of them being a particularly large one that I trod in during the night) and not all of them were on the news papers:)

Peaceful week at home

This week has been very peaceful. I'm still on holiday from work and the weather has been amazingly nice for the past couple of days, so we have spent a lot of time sitting outside on the grass in the yard.

I bring my book sometimes and a bone or a carrot for Senna to chew on and then we relax in the sun for a while whilst watching the world go by. There's usually a lot of activity going on there as well, which is good socialisation training for Senna. Oposite from where we live there's a kinder garden. At first she was a bit overwhelmed at the idea of so many "little persons" running around but now her little tail starts wagging when she sees a kid running around. She's also familiar with the fact that big truks come into the yard and that people cycling is nothing to be afraid of. She was very suspicious of a lady walking around with a pram the other day and let out quite a bark (didn't know there WAS a bark in there:). Otherwise she's scared of next to nothing and takes everything in her stride. We're doing some lead training sometimes as well and simple problem solving exercises such as how to get yourself unstuck when you've walked on the wrong side around a lamp post. There was some panicing in the begining, "help I'm stuck!!!" But with a bit of doggy sweet and some encouragement she is starting to understand what I mean by "walk around it" and drawing a big circle in the air.

A lot of people have started recognising her in the yard and some people have come up to say that they have been watching our little black cutie from their balconies. Nice. I think puppies bring out the best in people. They make people smile and say nice things and they have this amazing ability to brighten people's day simply just by being around.

She still sleeps a lot, and she seems to have put on some weight, she weighs an impressive 10 kilos now. Quite the lump to carry around. And carry her I had to this week, all the way to the vet more or less. She's got a slight eye infection which needed to be looked at by a vet, so, being only open during the day time I carried her into town with me, putting her down once in a while when she got a bit too heavy. I was curious to see how she would react at the vet's, whether she would be scared. But she was to busy saying hi to everyone and giving the vet the biggest wet kisses all over his face to care. We got some eye drops and that was that. Later on that day Irene, my Norwegian friend and fellow dog owner (Barney's owner) dropped by to say hi with her mum. It was nice for Irene to finally see her, but Senna had had a bit too much of an exciting day and couldn't quite calm down, she was running around biting and snapping at everything, so we had to help her relax a bit by putting her into the kitchen area for a while so she could go to sleep.

We went to the cinema this week, giving my friend Jonna an opportunity to dog sit:) She had been asking for a while and since we had free tickets I thought it would be a good chance to leave Senna with someone else for a few hours to get her used to the fact that she will be looked after by others sometimes. Did she notice we were gone? Did she cry? Pff, hardly. The happy go lucky girl that she is she was pleased to have some new friends around:) She played a bit, they took her out twice and then she went to sleep. The end:) It's nice to know that she's so easy going with everyone and that she's not worried when we're gone.

Tonight we're heading out to Mykyrä again, where we'll be staying until Sunday night. The weather forecast couldn't be better, 23C and sunny! Senna might even brave it fully into the water this time, let's see!

By the way, check out my brother Rasmus's blog (in Finnish) as well by clicking here!

What’s that wet stuff?

Last weekend we spent a night in the summer house Mykyrä. We were very curious to see how Senna would react to the large open spaces, the forest and above all, the lake! Since the summer house is built on a small peninsula in the middle of the forest she could roam freely. And roam she did, but all the time staying close to us to keep an eye on us, making sure we weren’t too far away.

We went for a small walk in the forest to see is she would follow us or run off on her own. But she’s still a very small little girl and the world’s a big place so better keep close to us for now she seemed to think:). She was also helping us with the weeding:) One by one she pulled up the tufts of weed growing on the patio. She was also quite efficient at jumping at and spreading around the heaps of leaves we just raked up as well:) But most of all she seemed to enjoy the pine cones, picking them up one by one and settling down to just chew at them and watch us clear up. She also had some fun with an oversized baloon. When it (inevitably) popped she wasn't scared, just seemed surprised at the fact that it was gone, "where did it go?". Very confusing:)

We took her down to see the lake early on. It seemed she couldn’t quite believe her eyes, all that water, could it really be!? And so wet! She took a few small steps into the lake at first, only getting her front paws wet and treading carefully and sniffing at it. Then after a few splashes she decided that this was actually quite fun and she launched both front paws into it, splash splash, splutter, splutter. She quickly discovered that although she wanted to get to that stick under water breathing under water was not an option:). Finally a very wet and tired pup emerged from the water (taking a “half bath”, only wetting the front part of her body, seemed to be more than sufficient as a first time experience she thought). Straight to her basket (yep it’s actually half ok sometimes nowadays:) she went and had a nice long and well-deserved sleep after all her exploring.

We went to the sauna and when we got back she was still asleep. We had been wondering if she would come seek us out when she woke up, since the sauna is some way from the main house, and had been just slightly worried that there was no dog to be seen anywhere. But all in vain, she came towards us with a bed head and a “why did you have to wake me up look”:). She was just completely exhausted and went back to sleep.

The next morning I was awoken by a wet nose in my face and a dog in our bed! Down she went quicker than quick! The bed in the summer house is a lot lower so she saw a great opportunity to get into bed with us the little sneak! It is so much easier to housebreak a puppy in an environment like that. We just had to open the bedroom door that leads straight to the patio and the garden to let her out in the (very early) morning. No balancing on one foot trying to get your other shoe on whilst holding a squirming pup in your arms. No hassle at all.

The next day Tuomo’s family came to have lunch with us and Senna enjoyed meeting them again (she had met them once before after just picking her up). But after a while, although she was enjoying herself, she couldn’t quite keep her eyes open any longer so I put her in her basket and asleep she was:). We left later on that afternoon and the little girl slept for the majority of the evening, only waking up once to be taken out. Then she wormed her way in under our bed and got back to sleep and we didn’t hear a squeak from her until the morning.