It's all just puppy drama

"Oh, I'm not so bad."

Walks are so much better. Angus occasionally barks like a maniac when something startles him--a weird noise, the scritching of an ice scraper on a windshield--but mostly he is hyper alert but calm.  Yesterday on one of his many, many walks (he is so indulged) (Rosie too) I took him right through the belly of the beast and he stayed cool.

That is, we saw up ahead two smallish boys with big yellow snow shovels flailing away at the sidewalk, and their dad briskly removing snow from the driveway.  "Want to cross the street?" Doug asked.

"Nope," I said, shortening up Angus's leash and getting treats at the ready. "We're going in."

And go in we did, right past the boys, past the dad, past all those shiny sharp fast-moving shovels, and I stuffed kibble into Angus's mouth just to be on the safe side, on the theory that you can't bark if you're chewing, but he really showed no sign of alarm.

He did bark at a young woman who was sitting on a bench down at the lake, and despite my brisk UH UH I had to kind of drag him away, but that was his only misstep. In his defense, she was sitting on a very snowy bench that she hadn't even bothered to swipe the snow from, and perhaps he was warning her that she was going to get wet.

In the morning I took him next door so he could properly meet the little boys who live on the other side of the fence--the little boys that Rosie barks at (we are working on it). We do not want Angus to start that terrible habit.

So we got all leashed up and went around to their yard, and they fed him treats galore and he was absolutely perfect, sitting (mostly) not jumping (mostly) and when Milo, the older boy, fell down in the snow the way that 7-year-old boys will do, Angus jumped at him and licked his face.

"You know why I like Angus?" asked Owen, the younger boy. "Because he's a baby."

And I thought, Oh man. you have no idea how big this baby is going to get.

We will go over there a lot, as often as possible, until the boys are just part of the scenery.  Thank goodness it has gotten a little warmer and people are actually outside again.

But when I am feeling in despair about things, when I start fretting that we have already ruined this wonderful puppy and have allowed him to be a barking, counter-surfing, biting, jumping-at-the-door maniac, Doug calms me down. (It's true, I am more tightly wound than he is. I know that surprises all of you.) "It's just puppy drama," he says. "He'll grow out of it."

Did I tell you that Angus is signed up to be neutered in March? And he is enrolled in Obedience 1 in April?  He'll grow out of it for sure. Or he'll be trained out of it.

Right now he is lying on his back on the living room floor, rolling back and forth, waving his gigantic paws in the air. My little diva.