Posted in Pet stuff

The wife and I have decided to get a dog. She's wanted to get one for a long time now, and after humming and hawing over what kind of dog to get, we settled on a Labrador Retriever. Last year she was all about Miniature Schnauzers. A few months ago, she decided to get something bigger that could also help fend off marauding strangers, so for a while we were considering German Shepherd dogs. We wanted a dog that would get along nicely with other dogs too, so finally we decided on the Lab.

Now we need to consider a time frame. I pushed for recyling a dog and getting one from the local Lab rescue group, or starting off by volunteering with them. But she wants to buy new. Fortunately, there seems to be a couple of prominent breeders in the area and not very far away for us to check out. That will be our next step.

This is Nala, the newest member of our family. We picked her up yesterday from the breeder, Fortune Labrador after a 10 week wait. She'll be 11 weeks on Monday. Isn't she just so cute looking? That's a Puppy Kong chew toy she's trying to figure out.

Her first night with us was a little bit stressful (as expected), but she's doing all right now. She's learning the lay of the kitchen, but still cries a bit when she's left alone. The hard part is trying to figure out the difference between the 'Give me attention' whine and the 'Gotta go to the bathroom' whine.

She hasn't quite figured out how to play when she's the leash, but we're working on that. She's young, so it doesn't take much to tire her out. A few short training sessions teaching her Sit and Down, and then a short trip outside for a bit of a walk pretty much does it for her at this point. So far she's a lot of fun to have around, except for the 2AM bathroom break. We're really looking forward to when she's a little bit older and we can teach her more interesting tricks.

Check out the other pictures in her own album

It's been a couple of days now, and I think Nala seems to be settling in. She's definitely got personality. One minute she's a couch potato sprawled out on the kitchen floor taking up as much space as she possibly can, the next minute she's tearing through the living room chasing a ball and almost colliding with the walls in the process. And just as suddenly she stops dead and stares at what's going happening on the TV. She heads off to the corner and sulks if we punish her, but happily comes when we offer a treat.

She likes the short little walks outside we take her for. She'll carry her end of the leash in her mouth while she's walking. We probably need to stop that and replace it with a bone or something for her to carry around instead of the leash.

This week I get to be a stay-at-home dad for Nala. Need to work on some training and education for her. She can be very stubborn when she doesn't want to do something. When we go outside for walks, as long as she's within sight of the apartment, all she wants to do is run back inside. Take her out of sight, and home is completely forgotten and she goes about doing her doggy things. She likes to smell everything, and for some strange reason she always wants to crunch on rocks (which we take out of her mouth as soon as she tries to grab one). Maybe they look like food or something to her. She isn't quite at the stage where she can hold something in her mouth while walking, so we can't keep her mouth busy with something else to keep her from picking up rocks to munch on.

She's fun to watch running around chasing a ball at the tennis court, although she has all the attention span of a gnat (as my wife says), so you constantly have to grab it and bounce it around for her to chase after. Otherwise she pounces at it, chews it a bit and moves on to something she thinks is more interesting, like leaves to munch on.

This is the position we usually find Nala in most often. Crashed on the kitchen floor, partly on her back and partly on her side. Growing dogs need their sleep I guess. She's 3 months old now, and in the 2 weeks since we've had her she's already put on 5 pounds and is up to 25 pounds now. She's going to have to start learning how to walk down the stairs on her own before she starts getting too big to carry.

Until we get the yard for our new place fenced, we're going to have to find a nice safe enclosed place for Nala to run around in. The tennis court here comes in handy for that. I'm trying to teach her how to fetch things. She does pretty good running after the ball, needs a little bit of work on bringing it back though. Early on in our play session, she'll come zooming back with the ball and overshoot me and just keep on running, so then I have to coax her back. During the middle of the session when she's run out some of that Lab enthusiasm, she's a little bit more reliable at bringing the ball back. Then towards the end of the seson, sometimes she'll just drop the ball and keep on running back. Other times I'll toss the ball, she saunters over to it and just keeps on going. That usually marks the end of the play session, so it's back home to do other things. Following a play session like this, that's usually a nap.

We've managed to get her to drop things reliably, which is a good thing because Nala's forever picking up stuff. She has this penchant for munching on live oak leaves. I'm not sure if she finds them tasty, thinks they look like her kibble or if she's just checking them all out.

This little puppy of ours is sprouting like a weed. She'll be 4 months in a less than 2 weeks, and at her last vet visit she weighed in at 33 pounds. Nala gets a kick out of visiting the vet. Heck, with all those people wanting to pet her, I wouldn't mind either if I was a dog. More booster shots and her rabies vaccine yesterday and she didn't even notice the needles. The bordetella vaccine she got intranasally made her stop and pause for a bit though.

She's definitely a lot taller now. Training her is getting to be a bit of a challenge. She seems to be getting to that age where she wants to try to rearrange the pecking order and challenge our rank above her. She's been testing us a lot more, so lately we've had to be a lot more stern when giving her commands. I'll be glad when we can get her into some obedience classes and get a little bit of professional help and advice with training.

Going for walks can be a trip now that it's getting warmer. Being a black dog, staying out in the sun can be a bit of a problem heat wise. But she's figured out that the darker shady areas are nice and cool to walk in. So when we're out for walks, she makes beelines for the nearest shady area and slows down her walking. When she's back out in the sun, her pace picks up towards the next shady spot she can see. It goes back and forth like this until the walk is done. Once we get within sight of our apartment building, the pace really picks up and if she's got the energy left, sometimes we'll break out into a run. And then back upstairs into a cool air-conditioned apartment and a big long slurpy drippy drink of water.

They say with labs you can never have enough chew toys, and Nala is definitely no exception. A trip to Superpetz for another bag of dog food the other day had us coming out with an extra bag full of more chew toys for her.

She's packed on another 5 pounds over the past two weeks (I swear every time I look at her she's gotten bigger than the last time I looked at her) and turned 4 months on the 27th. That's about the time labs start teething, which she's showing signs of. If it fits, it's in her mouth to be chewed on. Chair legs, the side of the table, fingers, her tail (if she can catch it).

Woke up around 3 this morning to the sound of Nala lapping up water. No problem, until my mostly sleepy brain remembers that she shouldn't have any water in her crate. So I drag my butt out of the comfy warm bed to see what's going on, and discover she's thrown up in her crate (P #1: puke). Mostly watery with chunks of undigested kibble. Ick. Wake the wife up and begin the clean up process. Afterwards, she whines to go outside, so I take her out where she promptly pees (P #2) and poops (P #3).

She did this a couple of nights ago too, but that time we heard her throwing up and it was brown sludgy mostly digested kibble.

She's been behaving normally otherwise. Eating and drinking fine fine and pooping normally. She's been downing her food a lot faster than she used to, so maybe she's just eating too fast and getting an upset stomach because of it. I don't think she's injested anything abnormal or unusual recently. We watch her pretty closely to make sure that she doesn't eat something she's not supposed to.

Hopefully it's nothing more serious than that. She only seems to be doing it at night, although she might be doing it during the day and just cleaning/eating it up before one of us gets back. Vet appointment on Friday for her last round of shots so we'll have her checked out then.

Nala's picking up a few names as she grows up. Sometimes I'll just call her Dog, the wife calls her Sweetpea occasionally. The latest one she's picked up is Nala Sockthief. She's developed a penchant for nabbing our socks. She'll come walking up out of the blue with a sock dangling from her mouth, which we then have to pry away from her. A few times we've caught her nibbling on one of our socks after she's snuck into the bedroom. This morning she came walking up to me with one of the wife's socks dangling from her mouth which, according to my wife, she pulled out from underneath the sliding closet door.

This dog is just too much. The sock thing we're going to work on stopping before she decides that they're edible. The Sock Gods have already received enough sock sacrifices from us out of the dryer. The last thing we need is another sock black hole for them to disappear into.

I have a dog that loves ice. Absolutely loves it. If I could make teeny tiny ice cubes I could use them as very effective training treats. Crack the freezer and she comes running from wherever she is, sits down so hard she makes a thump and waits patiently for a treasured ice cube.

If she gets one, she's happy as a clam chomping and chasing it around the kitchen. She picks it up in her mouth, chews it a bit until her mouth gets too cold and then drops it. Licks it a bit, grabs it again and repeats. Funny to watch.

If she doesn't get one, she has this sad disappointed look on her face and then trots away with you as you walk away.

From what I've read, this isn't terribly abnormal for Labs, and there seem to be a lot of Lab owners out there who's dogs love ice cubes.

5 months old last week, and weighed in yesterday at 48 pounds. I need to take more pictures of her.

The wife got to take Nala out to the off-leash area at James Island County Park today and had a good time. From what the wife tells me, Nala had a great time out there. The area is bordered by water, and after a few tentative splashes, Nala jumped right in to play with and chase some of the other dogs. She enjoyed being in the water so much it was tough to get her back out. Sounds like it was a good time.

Wish I could have gone too. Darned job...

Nala turns 6 months in a few days and is getting close to 55 pounds now. I'm sure her feet are growing faster than the rest of her, because she's got the biggest feet I've seen on a dog her size. In typical lab fashion, she's always following one of us around trying to see what we're up to, running to us or after us. So some part of us is always getting stepped on. A few months ago when she was smaller, it wasn't such a big deal, but now you definitely notice her big paws have intruded on your space.

Nala will be 8 months next week, and she's outgrown yet another crate. There she is sitting in crate #4, a big jumbo sized 41" long travel crate from SuperPetz (and the largest travel crate they had in the store). Her last one #Crate #2) was a 36" long travel crate that she was getting a little long for. Crate #3 is a 42" wire crate that stays at home.

I think this will be the last crate we get. Any bigger and we'll have to get a bigger vehicle. This one barely fits in the trunk, and pops the trunk door like a jack-in-the-box.

It's SuperNala!

A Drs. Foster & Smith catalog mysteriously appeared in our mail box a few weeks ago. With Hallowe'en coming, the wife decided the Superman costume was too cute to pass up and decided we needed to go Hallowe'en'ing with the dog. So here's Nala all dressed up in her Hallowe'en costume. Fit needs to be adjusted a little bit, and she's planning to get some red cloth to make a skirt out of (Nala is a girl after all).

Of course, all this has led to the wife wanting to plan a dog Howlowe'en party for some of our dog owning friends and maybe even dog owning neighbours.

There's even a pumpkin by the front door waiting to be carved into a jack-o-lantern.

Had a fun little Howloween party for the dogs at the dog park today. There were a lot of dogs there today, and a few of them dressed up too! Nala was in her Superman costume for a few minutes, but it didn't stay on for very long once she started running around. So off it came except for the cape. There was Isabelle the pirate, Sam the pumpkin, Tide in Hawaiian shirt and lei, Bones in fairy wings, Sara all dressed up, and metal rocker Edgar. We even provided little treat bags with some biscuits, tennis balls and a rawhide chew for some of the bigger dogs. I think everybody had a pretty good time (people included).

Nala's definitely having more fun with the cooler weather. During the summer she'd be running around, and after 30-45 minutes she'd be done and pooped out. Today she was running around the whole two hours we were at the park, and pretty much non-stop at that.

Nala turned 10 months yesterday, and weighed in at 70 pounds today.

We were out at the Labrador Fun Day hosted by the Coastal South Carolina Lab Retriever Club yesterday. Great day to be out at the park, and they had a lot of fun things for dogs and people going on. There were lab races, biscuit eating contests, costume contests, lab kissing and tail wagging contests going on, and retriever demonstrations both on land and in the water. Nala got 2nd place in the costume contest and race! Definitely a fun time, and we got to meet a lot of other lab owners and their dogs. When it came to the water retrieving, she went for the duck like a champ. Not the most elegant retrieve, and she ended up splashing the duck further away before she managed to nab it though, but she really went for it. Maybe we'll have to get one of those floating duck decoys. We'd have to attach it to a long string though, just in case she decides to go swim after something else.

There's this big white male poodle that shows up at the dog park every now and then. The dumb poodle must have a thing for labs, because every time he sees Nala, he's always running after her trying to mount and hump my poor little puppy. One of the other lab owners said his dog was victimized the other day too. There are plenty of other dogs around, but the poodle only goes after the labs. It doesn't seem like a dominance kind of thing, because as far as the poodle seems to be concerned, the only dogs around are himself and Nala, and he doesn't seem to go after any of the other dogs. It's a full time job just keeping the dog off Nala. Turn around and there he is again trying to climb on top of her.

Stupid horny dog.

Nala started doing this in the car

so we decided we'd better get her some Doggles to help protect her eyes from any dust or bugs.

Doesn't she look stylish? I think I need to find a motorbike to pose her on.