I have become a completely obsessed animal mom. I knew that I wanted to bring a dog into my life badly, and that B. and I would be good parents for a dog, but I am still so amazed at how well it's going with Lucy. She isn't a low maintenance dog. I do have to watch her at home to make sure she isn't getting into anything. She's very spirited and energetic, and sometimes the beagle comes out a little bit more than I would like!
However, I'm so amazed at her intelligence and her willingness to learn. We have been taking training classes – actually through a former youlookfab member (RandomThoughts') excellent studio-and participating in small dog play sessions as well as visiting the dog parks frequently. The combination of tons of socialization plus rewards based training has done wonders for Lucy. When we first got her, she liked people but she went crazy when she saw another dog because she had to socialize with them,and she just had no attention span for people when there were other distractions. Now, she still plays with other dogs, but she knows that she will get treats if she checks in with us and comes when we called her, or does other things that we ask her to do. Consistent training has motivated her so well. Her progress has been incredible to watch. When she's with us, most of the time she acts like she is "on-call" and is waiting for us to ask her to do something, or to reward her for a new behavior, because she knows that something really good will happen. In a short time (we adopted her in the beginning of July), she consistently comes when she's called, RUNS when we say an emergency recall word, sits, lies down, rolls over, follows a target (a hand moving around your body), and is starting to stay in a "sit" or "down" really well on command even when there's a good distraction around – we're working on it over the last few weeks. She is a much more visually oriented dog than the shelties I had in the past; we add visual markers like putting your hand up or moving our arm in a certain direction to help catch her attention and signal what she needs to do. I don't mind that at all – since shadow went deaf in her last years of life, we had to adapt to visual signals that she could follow. If I ever have a deaf senior dog in the future, at least I know that she'll already have visual markers for all of the things we ask of her.
I am so proud of my sweet Lucy. She is a really good-natured, happy dog. And so smart. I'm proud of us too for working with her so consistently. We've come along way in just a few months.

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