At the dentist.

I am promising myself that I will drag the camera and take a pic next time! But today Jake had a dentist appointment and I asked him if he wanted Burke to come or stay in the car. He said "come." So Burke joined us for the dentist. Both boys did great. Jake petted Burke's head at one point during his appointment, and held onto him as we walked back. Otherwise Burke laid in a down stay for the appointment.

Burke is still in training, and he won't lay down if I tell him to do it - he seems too nervous in these situations to reliably obey (he will always down stay at home on command!). But once he sees that not much is going on, he spontaneously lays down and stays there. I'll take it for now, but one thing that's on my list to ask the professional trainer is how to transition that from a spontaneous good behavior to a reliable one on command. He does better with sitting.

Then I had to return some 12 slim jeans to Kohl's - Jake has grown so much he needs 12 regular! There was trying-on of 12s and 14s that we needed to do, and Burke was fantastic in the dressing room, very unobtrusive - again he just laid down, and I was able to loop his leash over a hook in the dressing room and feel confident that he was just there, lying down and behaving. And while we were walking, I used my new over-the-shoulder leash most of the time. I didn't even have to hold onto Burke. I could just walk - and there, just a bit behind me and to my left, was Jake holding onto Burke's handle and with a waist tether, walking calmly. It felt like a bit of a miracle!

I told Matt about it tonight; he noticed the other day how calm Jake was when holding onto Burke after our walk through the woods at K's soccer game. He is coming around and really supportive of this whole endeavor, I feel. It's taken a big leap of faith for both of us, I think. For me it's taken courage - to feel confident in Burke's ability and just to be able to walk in somewhere like the dentist's office and say, hey, this is a relationship that benefits Jake, and Burke needs to be here. Burke can be such a goofy, typical adolescent puppy at home, but he really takes his job seriously and seems to appreciate having something important to do. It's kind of crazy, but I really have come to admire him as a dog. He has this intuition about what he is supposed to do with Jake and he just - well, he just does it. He knows when we're in a pet store and he can be goofy and a little hyper and sniff things. And when we're in a clothing store, or the pharmacy, or the dentist's office, he behaves perfectly - absolutely perfectly. I wish I could say it's due to diligent training on my part, but I think it's something else. Bonding with Jake, poodle intuition, the desire to work - I don't know what, maybe all of that. 

So, we move forward. I have emails to several trainers and will begin some professional training sessions within a week or two. Looking into a funding stream for this, but it may not pan out. I have gone from feeling like I should have just gone the route of getting a trained dog from a program, to feeling justified in asking friends and family to contribute to training Burke if they feel moved to do so - because we've come this far, and he is a very fine dog, and he and Jake have bonded. Why I feel embarrassed to be DIYing it yet again is hard for me to understand. I guess it's that - Lauren always has to make things hard! Can't just do it the usual way. I had to sort of back into this service dog thing. I don't know that I could have taken it seriously and gone into soliciting donations for a program-trained dog without knowing whether Jake would take to a dog, or whether it would be like his Dynavox - a very expensive paperweight that doesn't serve his needs. So that was it. I needed to know that Jake wanted this and that he could benefit from it. And now I know that he does want it and he absolutely can and does benefit from his relationship with Burke - in public as well as at home.