Mia's Monday Adventures

Mia goes over to my parents' house on days that I work to play and hang out with them. When she came home as a puppy I still lived with my parents. After about a year we moved out. My parents are really attached to her and like having her around so she gets to go over there about four days a week. They are retired so they are home with her most of the time and she also gets to run around and play with Emma (a terrier mix) and Kiba (a Corgi/Husky mix).

My younger sister, Mia's Auntie Jill, has been taking a class at a local community college this semester. My mom drives her to class and has been taking Mia with her. We have good family friends that live near the college so my mom usually goes over there to see them while Jillian is in class.

My mom's friend's mom, Hazel, is in the very late stages of Alzheimer's. A few weeks ago she was in a nursing home because she wasn't able to eat or drink anything (she has since come home but gone downhill again). My mom took Mia with her to visit her in the nursing home because they have always had a special bond.

When they arrived, Hazel, was slumped over in her chair. She was not responding to anything anyone was saying to her or anything going on around her. My Mom put Mia in her lap and she sat up, alert, and started petting her. After a while, my Mom picked Mia up and Hazel reached for her. So Mia spent a little while longer in her lap. Mia also got to visit with some other ladies who saw her and wanted to say hi. She did amazingly well with them too! My mom even said that Mia did not seem very nervous, if she was at all!

Needless to say, I was thrilled with how well she did. I have always thought she would make a great therapy dog (if we could just get over this darned reactiveness) and this has kind of given me a kick in the butt to get her into some behavioral privates. Hopefully, sometime in the (near) future she will earn her CGC and we will get certified with a therapy dog organization. I have done a lot of research on therapy dogs for my psychology classes and am so happy that therapy dog work is getting so popular. I am hoping that I can find a way to work dogs into my graduate research work (either in a nursing home or college/dorm setting).

This past Monday, Mia, got to go on her first boat ride! The same family friends live on a lake and have a Pontoon boat! Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. I wish my Mom had thought to take some with her cell phone but oh well!

Mia and her Nana.

Kiba (Husky/Corgi mix)

Emma (Terrier mix; she had a skin infection at the time but this is
the best picture I have of her because she is afraid of the camera.)

Agility Videos from February

I have a lot of studying and paper writing to do today so I thought I would just post some recent-ish videos of Mia doing agility. Normally she is more focused but she was very excited that my Mom was there that day and kept running over to her.

Agility: May 3, 2009

Tonight in agility our focus was working on getting the dogs "out," away from us.

Our trainer started us off by giving each of us a cone (or in Mia's case a little bucket because we ran out of cones!) and having us lure our dog around the cone and then click and treat:

Once they mastered that we added in a jump:

After the mastered one jump and around the cone we added the next jump:

Once they had mastered the two jumps we added in a front cross so that they ended up on our right side:

Eventually at the end of class we had progressed to this:

Each week I become even more amazed at what Mia is capable of. She is highly motivated by me running with her. She started to shut down a little and get the "dazed" look that she used to all the time when we first started agility when we were working on things where I wasn't running with her today. As soon as we progressed to some of the later steps where I running with her again she lit up and started running like a crazy lady. She could really care less about treats as long as I'm running with her.

Hopefully next week we'll work some more on the A-frame and teeter! Now that she's conquered the A-frame (well, at least twice on leash) the last fear we need to get her over is the teeter. We've even made considerable progress with that in the last few weeks.

I am also looking forward to starting her behavioral privates in a few weeks to work on her reactiveness around other dogs/cats. My long-term goal is to get her therapy dog certified so we can visit nursing homes.

That's all for now. Mia has officially crashed in her bed:

Mia the Chihuahua

Hi, I'm Kaitlin and will be mostly talking about my pup, Mia, on this blog. I am a college student majoring in psychology and minoring in Spanish. I will graduate in December 2009 and then I will be off to graduate school. I hope to eventually do some kind of therapy (possibly animal assisted therapy) in the future.

Mia is a spunky, little 3 year old red sable long haired Chihuahua. I adopted her on June 30, 2006 when she was 10 weeks old. Her favorite activities include sleeping, eating, playing with her best buddies Emma and Kiba, going on walks and to the beach, and AGILITY! We have been doing agility for almost a year now. We started on June 14, 2008. She absolutely loves it! Mia has some problems with her reactivness and is very afraid of most other dogs so it took her a while to warm up to the classroom setting. The first several months she barked a lot and was very, very nervous with the other dogs around. In the past few months she has blossomed and I am thrilled with the progress we have made.

This summer we are planning to work on her reactiveness with our trainer with the goal of her eventually passing the CGC test and getting her therapy dog certification.

That's all for now. I'll post a few my favorite puppy pictures of her!

Mia on her way home for the first time (11 weeks).

Precious Mia (3 1/2 months old)

Mia's first bath (11 weeks old).