At 15 Weeks

Here's a pic from when Cabana was about 10 weeks old. Can you see her "beauty mark" below her left eye? I love that mark because it will help us identify her, even in a sea of similar yellow labs.

Cabana is 15 weeks old today. Only one more week until she gets her final shots--yippee! After that, she will be eligible to go anywhere. We haven't been allowed to take her to places where a lot of unknown dogs frequent. Parvo is a highly contagious disease, and if other dogs are not up to date on their vaccinations, Cabana could become infected. With the winter warm-up these past few weeks, I'm hoping it will last for another week or two after her shots. I'd love to take her walking in some regional parks and hiking trails. For now, I've been confined to a few blocks around our house, which gets a little boring day after day.

A recent breakthrough with Cabana is that she is not waking us up in the morning with her pre-dawn barks. She has always been pretty good about sleeping through the night--but she is definitely an EARLY riser. I have wished that she would make it until after 6am--but she seemed to be stuck at about 5:50am. She didn't bark a lot--just a few intermittent barks until she could hear one of us getting out of bed. The past few mornings, she's been making it until 6:20am. Very nice!!

Winter time with a puppy can be tough. Not only did I spend a great deal of time in the cold, wind, and rain during those first few days, waiting for her to do her business, but these cold winter mornings are no fun. I know that we in California don't have much to complain about, though. 40 degrees would seem like a heat wave to people in Chicago right about now. But there's definitely a frost on our lawns and rooftops around here.

Cabana is learning sit, stay, come, wait, and down. With everything, the command is to be given once. If she doesn't obey it, we have to physically help her to do it. No command should be repeated--which is difficult for me, given that I like to say most things 3 times. Cabana's reliability on these commands is: sit 80%, stay 80%, come 80%, wait 100% (she's good at this one), and down 0% (she's not really getting down yet). Our older daughter has been teaching her "paw" and my husband is trying to teach her "where's your tummy" and "kunda kunda kunda" (this is a whole other story).