Poppy @ 7 months

...weighs 57.6 pounds and is turning out to be such a loving and intelligent dog. She surprises us all the time with her intelligence. For e.g. she'll look up at me and into my eyes when I say "look here". She of course already knew "sit", "stay" and "down" at 4 months. She also started rolling over at the command "over" after the puppy training. And we reward her with a nice belly-rub for that. Now she even knows "bring your toy" and will bring it from wherever it is (usually when we're going back inside the house after playing in the yard). We play a game of "find, where is it" with her by hiding her toys, so she knows that too. But the best of all is that she's started to recognize names. She knows my name, Vikram's name and will run to that person when their name is called and jump on them and lick them :) She also recognizes her buddy dog's names like Ruthie - the labradoodle, Sasha - the Doberman and Moca of course. She also still remembers her mom Opal's name :):)

SPAYING: A few weeks back we got her spayed and while she was an angel about it, it just killed me when she lay there whining every couple of hours all night in her Elizabethean collar that she hated, because she was so hungry. She whined only on the night of the spaying because we weren't allowed to feed her for 12 hours before and 12 hours after due to the anaesthesia. She also froze to the spot when we put the collar on her and presumed that she couldn't move. So I made her sleep in a corner of my bedroom those first two nights with the collar on and suddenly in the middle of the night, I would find her stuck against the window, bathed in moonlight, looking confused and sad and I had to "rescue" her. (Well, she thought she was stuck, if only she tried... sigh).

By the 3rd day the word "walk" and "treat" got her to move with her collar on - woohoo! But by the 5th evening we noticed that she never did try to lick her stitches, she only kept going at her flank, so we all said goodbye to the collar happily!

What a nightmare it was for us!