Happy Holidays from Mia...

Mia is having a nice holiday season with her family. 

Sarah is home and giving her lots of attention.  There are good smells in the house and fresh snow for frolicking. 

  

Catching Mia wearing Santa's hat was a trick.  She wanted to eat the hat or run off with it.

Mia is learning to take off gloves and socks. We are also working on "stand", "front" and "side".  It can get pretty confusing, even to us.

Mia and her family wish you 

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and 

Happy New Year 2009!  

  

Mia has begun collecting items of personal interest...

Mia has developed a bit of kleptomania.  She is pretty good as long as we are in the room with her, but if we leave for a moment we can't trust what she will do.  She likes to find things from the counter or other places like closets and baskets.  She is very quiet when she does this and often we come back after just a few seconds and she has some prize or another.  Usually she doesn't chew things, but there have been exceptions like George's eyeglass case or anything paper.  Here she is with one of her latest prizes!

We are working on the command "leave it" and she is getting that pretty fast.  Also she in learning to go to her bed when someone knocks on the door.  The hardest thing lately is the command "shimmy" which we have to catch her doing.  Some of her classmates are doing this already.  The class handout says it could take 1000 times to learn this.  Yikes!

The continuing saga of Mia...

Mia is learning to like the snow and cold.  She is obsessed with the wood chips in our yard and likes to eat them, even though they are not good for her.  If we don't catch her eating them eventually she will throw them up.  We learned "leave it" in class tonight and cannot wait for her to learn that command so we can use it for the wood chips.

Our cleaning ladies are getting to know Mia.  Mia waits quietly in her kennel while they clean.  We showed them what Mia is learning and how I brush her teeth.  They want to know if next month when they come whether Mia will have learned to brush her own teeth!   :-)

Mia now weighs 39.6 pounds.  She is still not very big for a lab and we are curious how big she will be when she is fully grown.  In two weeks she will get her hips checked and we hope they are good, so she can be a service dog.  Dogs with hip problems have to find new careers as demonstration dogs, pets, or therapy dogs.  We'll let you know how it turns out.