In Which Lolli Sticks Her Head Into the Lion's Mouth...

Meet Lolli's newest pal Athena!  Athena is a five month old great dane puppy, and she currently outweighs Lolli by roughly forty five pounds!  Despite the incredible difference in size, these two seem absolutely made to play together.  Athena is gentle, easygoing, patient and a bit clutzy, while Lolli is rough, frenetic, and somewhat crazy.  They balance each other perfectly.   Athena is so thick skinned (literally AND figuratively) that she seems able to take all sorts of nonsense from Lolli without fear or care.  Lolli reaps the benefit of the rough play that she loves without having a human bark "NO BITE" into her face every few seconds.  And Lolli's humans are just happy not to have those shark teeth clamping onto their exposed skin, for a little while at least!

Today Lolli is thirteen weeks old, and she sure has grown in the  four short weeks that we have had her!  She will have her third and final round of shots next week, at which point we should find out how much she weighs now, but I will venture to guess that she has gained at least three pounds, maybe more, since we got her.  She weighed a bit over eight pounds at that point, so I'm thinking she's probably in the twelve pound range today.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she doesn't turn into a "maxi" mini...time will tell!

Not only is Lolli growing physically, she is growing mentally as well.  She is inordinately clever and a great little problem solver...sometimes to my detriment, of course!  Thankfully she hasn't worked out the timing needed for jumping up onto the couch yet, although she has made it a few times by accident, and a few times by literally doing a "puppy pullup" (amazingly funny to watch!).  Mostly she just careens headlong toward the couch and throws herself at it with no real attempt at calculating a speed/height/jump ratio, and ends up bouncing off the seat cushions and flipping back onto her ass, bouncing off that, and starting the whole process over again.  This is most entertaining to watch.  

Lolli continues to work on her basic obedience skills and has a very solid mastery of sit, down, and paw (shaking hands), and is getting pretty good at "beg" and the take it/leave it game.  I am starting to teach her to roll over, since right now she doesn't mind being rolled onto her back.  However so far she seems to view this trick as more of me just messing with her than something I want her to on command, so often once the "roll" is complete, she leaps up and starts biting me like she will do to another dog that has just rolled her over.  At that point it gets very hard to recapture any kind of focus!  Our big upcoming project is "leash training 101", and I confess that I am nervous.   I think leash training is one of the toughest things to teach because it's not a natural thing for a dog to walk calmly by your left side, and despite reading  up on several methods of teaching, I think it's going to be a real challenge.  Still, she is super smart, and I think that together we can find a way to make it work!