Creating it along the way

When I started this journey I came up with so many tasks for Paige to do. Wake me up. Remind me to take my pills. Take me out if I get stuck. As I'm teaching these tasks, I'm noticing that I'm finding other ways to cope with many of these things. To teach Paige to wake me up, I have to wake up to get her going. In taking my pills on time, I have to get Paige excited to go and find the pills. Once some of these are trained, I may take it easy and let her do it for me or I may stay in the routine of just doing these things. When you are dealing with a psychiatric service dog, you aren't training for every day. You're training for the bad days. The days when you need somebody to haul you out of bed and kick you out the door. The days when you need somebody to say "take your meds" because other wise you would have forgotten. Right now, while I'm having good days, I keep forgetting the reason that I'm training these tasks. I think "why am I training Paige to get my pills. I can do it just fine on my own. And I've created other cues to help alert Paige that also alert me." This morning I woke up to Paige's new pill signal and got her all excited to find the pill case and for her to be able to get the cheese (her super high value reward) that is inside of it. Then I fell back into bed for a couple more hours without taking the pills. Don't worry: I remembered them at breakfast. Many people suggest using a "service human" to help with these things instead. Good idea. Downfall: a person isn't going to be available all the time. I need to be self sufficient, even on the bad days, and Paige will allow me to do this.

The major task that I'm training Paige for is public access. This is the one that I want probably above all others. An example: The other day I went to walmart to get a few things. This is my local walmart that is the smallest in the city. Nothing has moved in that store in the entire time that it's been in that location. Guess what: They are rearranging the store! Anxiety: 7/10. I thought I was going to melt. But I found what I needed. I came home and just stayed at home for the rest of the day.

Wish me luck. Today we're going to safeway but I'm taking Paige with me.

The bad. The good. And a concrete truck

The bad:
I think Paige is developing a barking problem. From the dog who didn't bark for the first 8 days that I had her to a dog who attacks the front window and pulls me down the street to bark at something. I miss the other dog. On Saturday, we were walking down an alley and she suddenly paused. I tried to get her moving forward again. Instead she attacked a 8', solid wood fence. I had accidentally managed to get the leash attached to the key ring that holds her tags instead of the heavy ring on her collar. She pulled the key ring apart, and it was a pretty heavy duty key ring. Luckily, since she was so busy barking at the fence, I was able to get the leash back onto her collar. And through all of this, I only ever heard a couple of growls from the other side of the fence. After I managed to pull her away from that fence, I had to go strait home. I couldn't do it. Right after we got home Nick showed up. I just showed him the pulled apart key ring and fell into his arms crying. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Why is this starting? Marni and I are going to go for a walk on Wednesday and see if we can't figure it out. I'm wondering if I didn't rush into my selection of the dog. This was something that I was worried about when I agreed to her and now it's escalating. And the worst part, when she does this, there isn't anything I can do in order to regain her attention. I'm glad I got Paige at 5 years old. I'm learning a lot about what I want in my next dog but I'm not going to be tied to her for too long.

Later in the evening on Saturday, Nick was rough housing with her a little bit. At one point she yelped - he said that he put pressure on her in the wrong way. She went to nip at him. When he moved backwards to avoid the bite, she lunged in further and snapped at the air in front of his face again. One corrective nip I could understand. The second one was inappropriate. I feel like I'm making this sound worse than it really was. After the walk we just had, it was just too much on me.

The good:
Sunday we decided that we wanted to buy Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii so we walked over to the local future shop. I took Paige because I thought it would be a good training exercise. On the walk over, we passed one dog and I had a dog in a working vest lunging and barking. I was so embarrassed. This is not how a dog in vest is supposed to act.

At Future shop, she took a little bit to settle in but then she was a super service puppy. Following me attentively with her eyes and moving with me when I moved. She's even starting to figure out what to do when I turn into her after stopping.

After Future shop we decided we were hungry so we went to Red Robins. Paige did her first restaurant. She climbed under the table under the booth readily. But she wasn't comfortable. She was stress panting and kept shifting around. After ordering I decided that we should go and practice bathrooms. I thought it would be a nice break from being under the table. Once we get there, of course the toilet in the large stall is plugged so we got to try and figure out how to fit a large dog into a small stall with me. I will say this: It can be done but it's clumsy. How do you move a dog in far enough to be able to close the door? Turns out that it's easiest to get the dog positioned where you would like them and then close the door over them when they are lying down. Who'd have guessed? Then it was back under the table. Paige decided that she should turn around this time so that she could look out. Voila! Much less stressful. And then boredom kicked in part way though the meal. She kept huffing at me. But I was very impressed with how long she lasted. When we go out of there, she was so done. It was vest off on the way back to the apartment so she could just be a dog. The lessons learned: Should have done a fast food restaurant before a sit down one; If there is more than 2 of us in the booth, Paige is going to have to lie on the floor outside of the booth.

And our final point: This morning we passed a concrete truck. Paige looked at it with her ears pricked up but didn't show any startle or fear. Good girl.

Paige update

Paige's training marches forward, except now we're having to go back and do stuff that was kind of solid before. For example, I'm on a med now that makes me sleepy and sleep really hard, and she's not doing her wake ups at all. With the lower bed, she's just sticking her head onto the bed (if she's doing that much) which isn't enough to wake me up. I wrecked her signal for "down." I used to just point at the floor but then I started pointing at stuff that I wanted her to paw target. So now I'm building a new signal to mean "down".

On the other hand, we have lots of new stuff. She will "give me 5". She turns in circles. This was hard to teach. I tried for a long time and then had to get creative. Puppy (a stuffed toy) sometimes is sometimes the best answer to problems. I got her all excited and when she spun in a circle, I clicked. The click means "I just did something and have to figure out what it is". It only took a couple more tries to get it figured out.

She also is getting very good at "take it" - to hold an object in her mouth until I ask for it. She's even starting to take a step with it in her mouth. Ulitmately, the task will be "find it" + "bring it" + "give it". A couple of days ago I asked her to pick up her leash. The first time she looked at me like I was retarted. "We don't put our mouths on that mom." Now she's doing it but she's still very hesitant with it.

She's getting good with the lamp. She's even starting to put her paws up on the dresser to reach it. And she gets really excited about that one. Now I just need to figure out how to build it into a wake up chain. Alarm goes off, she turns on the lamp, and then she jumps on me. That's what I want.

Nick is for me

I feel like I haven't posted in such a long time even though it wasn't that long ago. Still so much has changed, again.

After my last post, I finally lost it. I told Nick to stop talking to me for a bit. Completely stop. I said "I can't miss you if you won't go away." I really needed some space. During this time, Jenn acted as an messaging service when we needed to get hold of each other. Thank you Jenn. We had arbitrarilly picked last Saturday as our day for re-evaluation of our situation. I got so excited about seeing him. I dressed up and did my makeup and even put on perfume. If you had an idea of how often I did that, any of that, this was a big deal. I wanted to dress up for him so badly. At any rate, we're back together. I am going to be moving in with him again in the future. But I want to wait some more for that because he still needs to get his cleaning habits under control. We're also going to go to councilling together. We want to make sure that this works. But I have my hubin back (think a not quite husband). I know I'm missing stuff that happened but right now is good and I have hope about Nick and me.

We both also noticed on the same day - while we were not talking - that all of this started when I came off of my birth control. The headaches were becoming so bad that my doctor and I decided that we needed to try something. Since headaches is a common side effect for hormonal birth control, we decided to remove that. Within a week the headaches were gone. The week after that, I lost my mind and drastically changed life and left a lot of hurt behind me. Was the horomone balance involved in that? It's possible. I'm going to stay off of it for now. Let the horomones settle down. Maybe I'll reconsider it in the future. Maybe we'll try something that's non-hormonal. We'll see.

Paige at Winners.

I forgot to post this sooner. Enjoy

Service puppy at the grocery store

I figured that I would take Paige out on a really challenging outing. She did so well at Winners last week that I figured I would give a shot at this. I took it on with the understanding that we may end up abandoning a shopping cart half way through the trip. It wasn't going to be that long of a trip. I needed just a few items.

I am very proud of Paige and how she did. She had to work on getting focused when we first got there. It's still taking her a little bit to get into "the zone". Once she was there, she was spot on. There was even one point where we were walking forward and I said "wait" and she stopped on a dime. Perfect. She stayed right beside me the whole time, paying attention to where I was and what I was doing. I only had to use "leave it" a couple of times when her curiosity got the best of her. She didn't solicit attention at any point. I had her lay in front of the self checkout terminal. The girl monitoring the system said "I wish my dog was that well behaved." We seem to be gathering complements no matter where we go.

One thing that we do need to work on is simply walking around the community. When we were walking home, I just left her in vest because my hands were full and the bags were heavy. We saw a dog on the way. I told Paige to stay and she did, but she was talking her fool head off trying to convince the dog to come over. I'm very proud of the other owner. She asked if they could come say hello which let me respond "not right now. She's in uniform." But this is something that we need to practice more.