Emi's May Update

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Nothing but progress for our little Emi last month. Physically, she's finally adding some meat to her bones and I'm guessing she's 17 lbs right now! She has very solid hindquarters and a big ol' tush now. Her once brittle fur now has a beautiful sheen to it after some much needed Omega-3s and the skin flaking has subsided. She and Shio have been shedding up a large fur storm and our apartment has become dust bunny central!

One of Emi's greatest skills is that she knows when to get excited and when to lay down and be a cuddle bug. She loves to hop onto the bed in the mornings and snuggle up next to me and I wind up losing an hour every day laying next to her with my face buried in her fur. I call that lost hour my "Emi Spending Time." She still gets very hyper around midnight and has Shiba zoomies by herself. We like this because she tires herself out!

When playing with Shio, you can tell that she's a lot more confident and will use her front paws to smack him around while biting his face. The four of us went away to New Jersey for the Memorial Day weekend and Emi did very well on the road trip. Our long neighborhood walks in the morning and evening are helping her adjust to her loud surroundings though we still have a ways to go. It has been tradition for her to shy away from new people so whenever we have guests in our home, we expect her to hide under our bed until she feels comfortable enough to come out. Our friends and family usually make a big deal about her emergence from the bedroom towards the living room so she retreats immediately back under the bed. This repeats over and over again throughout the night. In our last 48 hours while my in-laws visited, Emi felt very comfortable hanging out in the same room with them after her initial run to the bedroom and hide reaction. The difference was that they carried an even toned and light hearted conversation the whole visit and ignored her the whole time.

We were finally able to test her reaction around cats for the first time last month. We visited our friend Georgie at their apartment and Emi ignored him the whole time. Then she stole his window seat and his bed!

Now that Emi's a lot more comfortable, we've started working on training both the dogs. It's very difficult to have Emi acknowledge us when she's frightened outside but we're working on training her at night first when she's less afraid. Soon, we'll work on daytime training to reenforce the work we do at night and take it from there!

Overall we're very excited to see what next month will bring.

Where Brooklyn At?

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"Where Brooklyn at? Where Brooklyn at?" 'Cause Shio just moved and he's trying to figure out where he's at.

Okay so it's ridiculous to quote Biggie when we moved to downtown Brooklyn... a fairly safe neighborhood with lots of loved dogs. It's been 3 weeks since we moved to our new dwelling and a much longer period of time for anticipating the move. Five months, to be exact. Luckily, we saw that Jenna and Snickers were moving and asked Jenna for some advice on helping Shio adjust to his new home. Coupled with Jenna's and our own techniques, it seems that we've achieved a smooth transition from old home to new home for Shio.

Here's what we did:

1. Labeled our "Open Immediately" boxes clearly. They included our everyday necessities, kitchen spoils, and most importantly, Shio's toys, beds and bowls. We set up his belongings as soon as we finished moving so that he would feel at ease to see familiar items in new surroundings.

2. Found a pet sitter for moving day. It's amazing to me that families will "forget" their pets during the move. How can you forget? Making sure that Shio had a proper sitter the day of was one of our priorities. We have wonderful friends whom live down the block from us and they were happy to watch Shio for the day. And Shio was happy to be with his buddies for the day. And we were happy to have Shio out of the way for the day. Talk about win-win-win.

3. Visited the new neighborhood with Shio before the move. We schlepped to Brooklyn with Shio a couple of times to allow him to sniff and mark his new neighborhood. After we moved, Shio was already familiar with the area and knew how to walk straight to the dog run from our new place!

4. Keep dirty bedsheets. At first, we weren't sure if Jenna was messing with us and wanted us to be the stinky new people on the block (jk), but she gave us some solid advice on keeping our scent on our bedsheets. When we moved, the first thing we unpacked were our sheets and put them on the bed. The first thing Shio did was jump on our bed, sniff around in circles and plop down on the bed. Just to let everyone know, we did wash them as week before we moved so we wouldn't be too dirty.

5. Keep the same routines. 9am potty & breakfast. 5pm potty & dinner. 10pm potty. That's all there is to it!

Hope this was helpful for anyone that's moving.

In the meantime, we're going to keep working on adjusting to our new surroundings.

It's a whole new world out here. :)

 

Shio vs. Georgie the Cat

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Whenever we see a cat, Shio will tug with all his might at the end of the leash to try and sniff the funny little creature that doesn't want to have anything to do with him. We've never officially met a cat because the ones we bump into have been traumatized by dogs and run away. Last week, we met our first awesome exotic short-haired cat named Georgie! He's our friend's cat so we knew it would be safe to let Shio around Georgie. Ooooh I was so excited to see how Shio would react!

Waiting for Georgie to come down to play:

Peeking at Georgie from underneath the coffee table:

Overall, the whole experience was anti-climatic. I had all these high expectations of Shio frolicking with Georgie. Or getting smacked in the face by a cat's paw for being a hyper puppy but that didn't happen. Or grooming each other and napping together. Instead, Shio spent 30 minutes getting close to Georgie and then running away. Georgie was the one chasing after Shio! Who's the scaredy-cat now?!

This was the closest he got to Georgie:

Georgie can also be found via his tumblr site: http://georgietales.tumblr.com/ Hop over and say, "Hi" to our new friend!