First solo outing

Tonight Kaline and I went on our first service dog outing sans Juno. I will admit it, it was weird. I think it was good for both me and Kaline, though, because I was able to focus completely on him.

Everyone loves the Stannie!

I tried so hard to tire him out beforehand. We did a pack walk in the morning; I got to borrow Gracie for the afternoon, so he had a nice long wrestling session with her; and then we went to training in the park. He did so well. He did literally the best recalls he has ever done—came galloping in, lovely enthusiasm, and if he didn't sit straight, at least he didn't rock back and away from me at the end. He did good heeling and weaving through dogs too. At the end, he did an awesome down-stay, off leash, next to Juno while I gathered up the other dogs we had to drive home. I even ran him around in the sun trying to basically fry his little brain.

It all seemed to have worked when we arrived at the Stanford Theatre after dropping Juno off at home. Kaline was fantastic in line, standing next to me (not sitting, even though we've worked on auto-sits). He's not really capable of blocking, since he's still pretty small, but it was definitely great behavior to build on. He gave me really nice attention. When we waited on a bench for Sonja and Chief to arrive, Kaline did an automatic settle. He did really nice in the concessions line as well, standing again and watching the whole time. Didn't go for any popcorn or anything!

Auto-settle in the lobby.

Then his buddy Chief arrived, and both the boys were like, "Wait, what? We can't have a play session?" Up in the theatre, they both took a while to settle down. We just had to laugh at them and their adorable puppy-ness. Chief was kinda crawling about on Sonja's lap, and Kaline kept trying to sneak over to Chief's mat. Once Kaline got half on my lap and gave Sonja a very presumptuous poke with his massively oversized paw. He was the first one to go to sleep, and then Chief conked out. I thought we were home free. And then they both woke up again.

Kaline, having done lap-ups at my request out in the lobby, just started doing them over and over once he woke up. Again with the muffled giggling. I cuddled him, and once he got off, put him back in his down on his mat. Over and over and over. Sonja joked that when we want to actually watch a movie, we should bring our girls. And then right as the movie finished up, both boys curled up on their mats and pretended to be model service puppies in training. Gotta love them!