Believe me, Monday with Marqi is NOTHING like Tuesday's with Maury! We went to training class last night and entered with a bang. Quite literally, as we were walking towards the rest of the class Marqi managed to clip me and send me up and over on my keester in front of the entire class. What was that quote I sent yesterday? Ah, here it is, "Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great." Yes, I'm definitely ready to be great!

Anyway, I picked myself up and dusted my butt off and we started paying attention to class. Well, I did. Marqi decided to get the Boxer pup in trouble by dancing up to within 3' of it and then play bow to it. The Boxer took the bait and they were off and leaping at the end of their leads. We moved elsewhere. First up was to see if any of the pups really had a good understanding of what "target" is. We were all supposed to put the target on the ground and tell the pup, "Touch!" Most of the pups weren't focusing on the target when it lay motionless on the ground. Marqi, on the other hand, knows that that plastic lid means food is close by so she pounced on it no matter how far away I put it and then said, "Touch!" Did I mention that Marqi is like Mikey in the Life cereal commercial? "Give it to Mikey, he eats anything!" That's Marqi.

Next we were all supposed to stand in front of a jump with no cross bar, just the uprights and work on sending the pup away from us and then calling them back to us. Marqi still doesn't believe me when I say "Go!" but she sure does do a right nice "Come!" when I call her back. She got the hang of it and I was able to send her out from a fair distance from the jump.

Off to the tunnel with a small bend in it. Annette held the puppies and we were to call them through and target them at the end. Marqi does not like to be held by some other person. She leaps, she flips, she backs up and she carries on like a wild woman. However, when I called, "Marqi!" she focused on me right away so that when I said, "Ok, go tunnel!" she shot through like a cannonball. Next up, send them through the tunnel and then utilized our "go" work and stand at the tunnel entrance point to the jump ahead of the tunnel (with a target on the other side) and say "Go! jump!" Marqi saw the plastic lid and had no problem driving forward and away from me.

In between her session with the obstacle work, I worked on sit and down. When she sits on command she very cutely arranges herself so that her tail sticks out between her front legs...every time she arranges it so. If it doesn't end up there when she first sits, she wiggles her butt until it does get there. Then she sits and looks at me with her ears on top of her head and her eyes all bright with anticipation for whatever is next. She did not know down when we started class but is going down when I give her the command, tho I do still have to bribe her down. But at least I'm not bribing and "helping" her at the same time. And, I am starting to work on "wait" so that she learns to stay for the pause table and I can maybe do lead outs with her as time goes on.

The last thing we worked on were weave poles. She is quite remedial there compared to her class mates but all of her classmates had been in another class prior to this one so were already exposed to them. Last night I got her to enter from the second pole from the beginning and head down the channel at a pretty good clip. We started the evening entering the poles from the last pole before the end so I think she made good progress.

So, that was Monday with Marqi. Tonight it's Tuesday with MeMe. Surely that can't be quite as exciting as Monday with Marqi. I hope not anyway, I don't think my body can take two night of spills and thrills!