Happy Thanksgiving!

Trying out a new way to share photos, since in my opinion Blogger is a bit dumb about their formatting. Here are some adventures we've had in the last few weeks. Hinck had a bout of sickness the week before Thanksgiving, most likely resulting from a kitchen escape and subsequent chewing to death of shoe insole/glossy advertisment (see pic) but he is back to 100%, thank goodness! He had a good holiday and maybe got fed a few extra kibble but on the whole avoided us overstuffing him. (As they say on It's Me or The Dog, Obesity is a human problem! Likewise overeating on holidays!) He also finished up with Puppy 1 class; we are hoping to sign up for Puppy 2 starting sometime in January. He'll still be attending Playgroups when we can, but his socialization seems to be going great. Altogether, he's earning top marks on being a good dog. This week he discovered air mattresses and fell in love...but at the moment he's making due with the floor, taking a huuuuge nap after 4 days of being the center of attention.

P.S. Hinckley appears to have discovered twitter. Check the blog for tweets :)

Hinck's official!

So, Hinck had his final shots on Tuesday and now we're official to go to parks and what not. And just in time...sometime overnight in the last week he turned into an adult! Seriously! Its like his legs spontaneously added two inches or something and now all of sudden he looks so...regal. He's still got his nice soft puppy fur on his head and ears, but you can feel the real stuff growing in on his back. Its pretty amazing how much bigger he's gotten already. I have a feeling everyone's going to be surprised when they see him at thanksgiving.

Hinck and I are having a fabulous day relaxing together. I got today off after working for about 2 weeks nonstop ridiculous hours (including the entire weekend,) and its been great to recover, CLEAN, and spent some QT with Hinck. We're pretty behind with our homework from class so we're trying to work on that too.

Hinckley's photo shoot

Hinkley
Originally uploaded by mnarrowe

In case you didn't catch it, our friend Meredith took some awesome photos of Hinck last weekend when i was working (blaaaah) and Tyler was talking care of the pup. This is just one of them, but there are more, which you can see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26588367@N02/sets/72157622655876915/?photo_deleted=4094923622

Happy Halloween!

We had a fun-filled halloween with Hinck...if he could talk maybe he would say it was a bit TOO fun-filled, but I think he had a good time. We started with playgroup (a Saturday staple at this point) which is always pretty exhausting, even if you play with the small dogs. Then after some napping, we drove Hinck up to the city to visit with Sally and Adam. He stayed back while the four of us did some walking around the Mission, but then we came back for dinner and costume-readying.

As you can see, Hinckley was an adorable pumpkin. Tyler and I were farmers - he was the crop :) Once Julie and Julia (Sal and Ad) were reading to hit the town, we all got in the car and drovS to the middle of the mission. There, we walked around and walked to the Castro...being told about every three seconds that Hinck was THE CUTEST THING EVER! in shrieky voices. Poor guy had to deal with goblins and bloody people and even Skrek petting him and getting in his face and he took it amazingly well. Wagged his tail the whole time!

We did some more walking and stopped at a party (more Hinck fans made) and then called it a night at last. It was probably the longest day of Hinckley's life (he stayed up until 1:30!) Needless to say, he has been sleeping all day long. He was a great sport, and if there were ever any worries, I think we can safely say he is "socialized". I just hope he was having fun...we tried to make him comfortable and fed him tons of treats (dog treats, not people treats :P) along the way so I think he was happy. Hooray for Halloween!

In other news, Hinck's classes are continuing to go well. We're learning about impulse control and how to teach him to go to certain places by associating them with positive reinforcement (kibble) - stuff like 'touch' (sustitute for come), 'go to your mat/place,' and 'with me' or 'by my side' (substitute for heel.) If we teach him the mat trick well enough, then I can hopefully teach him when its ok to get on the couch (mat's there) vs. when its not (mat's absent.) I'm excited about that. Just got to keep him from eating the mat (and the couch for that matter) for now.

-Jo (not sure why it reads as Tyler)