My Cute Shelter Dog

I joined a class with Western States K9 College to help train shelter dogs to give them a better chance at finding a home! We work with the dogs each Saturday for an hour or two until they get adopted.

Here's the cute dog I'm working with! We practiced sit, down, and taking treats softly this past week. She did great! She really tries to figure out what you want her to do, is very gentile, and loves treats!

You can find more information about her through the Salt Lake County Animal Services. Her details are here. This is a screenshot of her details. Isn't she pretty?!

They found her without a name, so she doesn't really have a name. It looks like the shelter staff have named her Boo, but I think she looks more like a Sasha :) What do you think?!

The Salt Lake Pet Super Adoption is coming up on May 4-6th. She may be there since Salt Lake County Animal Services is participating. I'm going go try to go that Saturday since we won't be having class that day :)

Utah Puppy Hoodies

A few years ago I found an awesome pattern at the fabric store for dog sweaters. Since I didn't have a dog, and my dog would be way to warm with a sweater, I made some for my friend's cute puppies!

The first one I made was for cute little Harley:

As you can see it was a bit too big. The arms were too big and she got a bit lost in the hood... hehehe... Where did she go?! You can barely see her under that hood :)

I sure do miss this girl! She was such a good dog. May you rest in peace little Harley pup.

Learning from my past experience, I made her little sister Mia's sweater a bit smaller and with short sleeves. I love the way the sleeves turned out. I was a bit worried since the cuff was a bit small for the width at the top of the sleeve. But, it scrunched up very nicely, and I think looks a bit more girly :)

She tried it on yesterday (dang it, I didn't get a picture!) and it looked so cute! It was a little bit big, but not too bad. We could say it was a bit roomy :) The short sleeves definitely work a lot better than the long sleeves. And yay, I got it done before football season! (Score for me) I've only been working on this for like a year and a half.. hehe.. I tell you, it's so nice not to be studying. Now I have time for fun projects like this one!

I used my mother-in-law's embroidery machine to stitch the letters. Also learning from past mistakes, I cut out all the pieces and stitched up as much as I could, leaving enough room to fit each piece in the machine. Last time I had to take out stitches to get it to work... not fun. The drum is a patch I found online. I really like the way it turned out! Maybe I can make a thin one for Schoko or maybe another tutu? We'll see...

Now Mia can help cheer on the team with us on game days! Let's Go Utah!

Learning New Things

Today after work I looked at my crazy dog who was anxiously waiting to do something. I could tell she needed some attention. So, instead of the usual frisbee game I thought I'd teach her something new. Frisbee is nice because it wears her out physically and it's her favorite thing to do. She is in love with her frisbee. It's kind of cute, she always knows where it is. If it gets lost, like on the neighbors roof, (oops!) she goes crazy running around the house looking up to find it. She will never give up trying to find it because it's her favorite thing in the world. I sometimes think she likes it more than me :) hehehe. Today she looked like she needed a mental challenge, not so much physical exercise. So, after a half hour of working with her she now knows how to "get on the porch" :) When I tell her to get on the porch she runs up and waits. I even threw that favorite toy and she stayed on the porch. What a good girl!

I think she's super smart because of how fast she figured it out! But she is still her sneaky self and tries to put her front paws on the second step, just to test her boundaries. I sometimes think she's too smart for her own good because she tries to find out how she can get away with things. I'm sure we still need to practice but she got the hang of it.

Easter Fun

We took Schoko out for an easter egg hunt in the park :) My friend Jenika went to a puppy easter egg hunt at Wheeler Farm and thought it would be fun to do with friends. So, she set it all up and we had a great time - Thank you Jenika! It was fun to see the puppies finding the eggs and not quite knowing what to do with them. They could smell the treat but couldn't quite get to it :) Schoko would find an egg lick it, then move on to the next. She tried to bite the eggs a couple of times and then gave up and moved on. Spence helped her get them open so I could take pictures!

Mmm.. Yummy! :)

Happy Spring!

My Little Puppy-Pup

I can't believe how much my little pupalup has grown! I remember when we picked her up and kind of freaked out because I realized I didn't know what to do with a puppy! I didn't know how much to feed her, how to take care of her, or anything. I had read books on training but not so much some of the day to day things. It was overwhelming. But it has been such a great experience. I've learned so much from this crazy little girl. I've learned that taking care of her takes patience, a lot of hard work, and love :) It has been totally worth all of it. She's such a good dog and we couldn't have done it without Joe at Western States K-9 Co! She helped me realize that it's okay that my puppy isn't perfect; we can figure it out and just learn to live with how she is and work on improving. Being the perfectionist that I am, that took some time to figure out. I know we're sometimes hard on her, but she's hard on us too (hehe) and we've learned to work together as a little family. I think Spencer's face in the photo below captures his nervousness perfectly! :)

I'm really so proud of her. I now know how to enjoy and look for the little things that happen. Like when she saw the neighbor kids and really wanted to go play with them (well more like pounce on them!) and I told her to leave it and to come inside and she listened! If you would have told me she could do that a year ago I would have laughed. I tend to look at the big things and overlook the daily things. She helps remind me that can be excited for the tiny moments when there's a little improvement. Like that split second where she listened ~ we celebrated with treats and excitement!

She's a constant reminder for me that I need to enjoy the little things in life. 

Now I need to try and apply that for my own improvements (yikes!)

Craftiness

A while ago I got hooked on Pinterest. How could you not get addicted? It's like having all of the internet at your fingertips, scrolling through pictures and ideas has never been so easy! I found these cute bottles on Pinterest a while ago:

I wanted to do something creative and thought this seemed easy enough. My supportive husband helped me out :) hehe We went to WalMart and found some spray paint in colors to match our living room. The bottles are old Italian Soda flavor bottles we had laying around. They were super old, so we cleaned them out, and got them ready for the project. (I didn't want to add the phrases because I really didn't know what we'd put. I'm not a fan of the words "Home, Family, Love" gah. It's too cutesy for me so mine are a solid color.)

Since it was windy, we put tarps out in the garage and started to spraypaint the bottles. We may have a tinted color garage floor in some places, oops! ;) 

We tied a rope around a nail and dropped the nail into the bottle. Then we got the nail to lay flat so we could hold onto the rope to hold the bottles up while we spray painted. This way we could paint the bottoms a bit too. Tip - to get a smooth coat, lightly spray paint the bottles and keep adding layers slowly. This way you won't get any paint drips :)

We hung the bottles to dry on a piece of pvc pipe we had laying around. I love the way they turned out! The colors match and it was a quick, cheap way to add some color to the mantle.

It's nice to have a life again :)

Downtown Adventure

The pup had quite an adventurous Saturday! We went out to Saltar to scope out places to take pictures by the lake. Then headed downtown to find more places we could take pictures. The puppy was such a good girl. She got to see the Trax for the first time, the city cars, smells, and all the people. We walked around the new City Creek Mall and she was quite popular. The kids all wanted to pet her, and people kept stopping us to talk about dogs and ask questions. You could definitely tell which people didn't like dogs since they'd give us the stink-eye! but we had fun and she was very well behaved. She went on her first elevators and escalators. She wasn't sure what those escalators were but we walked up and down them without any problems. She's such a good sport and was such a good girl :)

We found her a water cup since I forgot her bowl and we ended up being gone all day. How funny are these pictures of her face in the cup?! She licked it clean hehehe

I saw this awesome kid's lounge set at Costco. It was so cute I just had to take a picture of it! I told Spence we may need it to do kid portraiture (hehe) Isn't it super cute?!