Anticipation....

In the picture below, Cooper is truly anticipating our next move....we play Retrieve with him but make him wait before we throw the toy.  He is learning to be very patient.  Russell and I are also in anticipation mode as we will be meeting with Matt and Ali tomorrow to review our kitchen design in more details and discuss next steps in the project.  Ali is the one designing our kitchen so we are very much looking forward to seeing her work. We now also have a very good idea how we want our kitchen to look, from a colour scheme perspective i.e. colour of the cabinets, countertop, colour of appliances, etc.

This past week was uneventful.  Last Sunday, we took Cooper to the indoor dog park.  He had a lot of fun and he played with many dogs, two of them were Havanese.  One of the Havanese dogs is 3 years old and weighs 12 pounds.  Cooper is 8 months old and now weighs 14.8 pounds!  We did a weigh in this past Friday.  He is visibly bigger than when we got him 11 weeks ago.  But he is still lean, we can easily feel his ribs and his two pelvic bones when we rub him without applying any pressure.  He is simply bigger than the normal Havanese both from a weight and height perspective.  Darlah, of Talemaker Havanese, actually told us that Cooper's brother, for another litter, is 24 pounds!  We doubt that Cooper will get that big but one never knows....one thing I know for sure is that we do not feed him junk food, except on the day where he has obedience class (that will stop in 3 weeks) and he gets plenty of exercise.

On Wednesday, a friend from work came for lunch.  It was nice seeing her and she was happy to meet Cooper.  I must say that I have not been back to the office since I retired last October but I will stop by one of these days.

On Friday, we visited a supplier for our countertops and Cooper was invited to come along. The owners of the store have a dog (although he wasn't there) and had no issue in letting Cooper walk around the showroom.  We wish more places would be pet friendly. Yesterday, we went to Toronto for our hair cuts and Cooper came along as well.  This time, we did not use the sherpa bag.  We either carried him or kept him on a leash.  Dogs are not allowed in office buildings so we had to be careful, although one security guard saw us and didn't say anything.  Cooper was very good and waited patiently for our hair cuts to be done.

I finished reading "Following Atticus" and I truly enjoyed the book.  I now follow both Atticus and his owner Tom Ryan on Facebook.  I started reading another book called "The Body Language and Emotions of Dogs".  This book is about the emotions that both owners and dogs exchange and how to use them to create a lasting bond.  Very insightful book.

As I am writing this blog, Cooper is trying to get my attention by barking a little.  He seems to be going through a phase now where, if we are both busy doing something, he wants our attention.  This will pass and we simply have to ignore him when he does that (although not easy to do).  For the past week, he has also started to sleep on the mat by our bed.  He starts out the night by sleeping on top of our bed, then wakes up and asks to be put down (our bed is too high for him to jump).  Interesting, as he will not start out the night by sleeping on the floor....Funny what dogs do sometimes.

That's about it for this week's blog. Another Sunday has begun, the weather will be nice so we will walk this morning and go to the indoor dog park this afternoon.  In between this, I will do a few things around the house and cook a little.

Have a good week.  Time for us to give Cooper some attention! Below is a small video of Cooper playing.