Breeze's First Thanksgiving

As Breeze's first Thanksgiving comes to a close, let me explain the photos. I just happened to be walking through the kitchen this morning and found Breeze and her friend at the water bowl. How polite of her to allow her squeakie toy to share! (I swear I did NOT stage this photo; the toy was sitting there just like that!) Yes, I keep the dogs' water dish inside a plastic tub. I started doing this when Walker was young, as he liked to play in the water dish. For some reason this configuration broke his habit...and this seems to prevent all the dogs from dripping water, spilling the dish, etc.

A few minutes later I realized it had actually stopped RAINING -- for the first time in many days -- so I decided to let Breeze have a romp in the back yard.  I'm standing on the covered patio taking the video with my cell phone.  The noise you'll hear is the squeakie toy Breeze has in her mouth.  One happy, happy Terv puppy!

The past couple of weeks have been a time of change for Breeze.  She's more interested in playing the "learning" game with me and has proven to be a great little demo puppy for my competition obedience class.  Breeze is definitely toy motivated, so a game of tug before and after a little obedience training makes her very happy.   Food is a good tool for luring and rewarding specific behaviors, but tugging and retrieving are her ultimate motivation.   I hope to get some videos of her in the near future

Last week Jerry & Lois Levin of Creative Indulgence were at the training center for portraits.   They took some wonderful photos of each of my dogs and I'll post them here when I receive the JPEGs.  It took Breeze a couple minutes on the set to realize we wanted her to sit still; then she was all ham.  Like all my black dogs, she definitely knows how to work the camera!

Happy Thanksgiving 2011!