Back from a blogging break

Hey all! I am back! Sorry about the lack of posts, but I needed a break. Life had gotten pretty busy and stressful, and something had to take a break, and unfortunately it couldn't be life. I needed to take a step back and slow down.



Right now, I am stuck in the house, as I just got my wisdom teeth taken out. Riley and Grace have taken their cuddling jobs very serious! My husband has also done a very good job taking care of me, providing me with ice packs and ice cream. Since I am now on day 3 of recovery, I am a bit more functional and I figured now would be a good time to get back on the blogging band wagon. So here we go!

Although, we will see how coherent my train of thoughts are, as I am on a few different medicines!

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Not too much has been going on dog-wise. I have continued going to our agility and obedience classes but haven't been competing, although I hope to change that soon. Riley is doing very well in agility class, he is listening more and more to my directions. Along with Riley learning to listen to me, I am learning to listen to Riley. I am learning he likes for me to do front crosses and he's not a big fan of rears. Also we have been practicing weaves and he is doing 12 poles dependently! We had a little set back a few weeks ago, when he went through the weaves and got caught up, and kind of hit his shoulder pretty hard. After that he was a bit hesitant. We had to go back to basics for a few days, to get his confidence back up and now he is back to normal weaving self, which is what I am most happy about!

Grace is doing very well in our obedience class. Half the time I am helping assist our trainer with the newbies in class, so this gives me and Grace a perfect chance to practice her down stays with major distractions. I am going to be working hard on her heeling, as I would like to earn her RE title. Her heeling is pretty good, but I would it a bit more focused/crisp.

The above picture is of Grace and her look-a-like Rocky. I have watched Rocky and his owner progress over the past couple months and they have come a long way together. Rocky was a rescue from a bad background,  on day 1, he was extremely leash reactive and had no focus, in the picture above, was his first day of Intermediate class, after graduating Basic. His owner was so giddy on how far he has come, not only staying in a down stay (his weakness) but doing it so close to another dog. It makes me happy to see the relationships between an owner and their dog blossom.

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My husband and I have also been working a lot on our house. For one, we had to get a new AC unit, unfortunately, but we knew it was coming. We have also been doing some updating to the inside. First, was our half bathroom, it took us about 3 weekends to finish but it is a %100 improvement and we love it! Although not everything went smoothly during the renovation, it all turned out good in the end.

Another improvement we did, which went much much smoother then any of our other projects, was replacing our kitchen sink faucet.

We have also finished (finally) our patio! It was a bit of a fiasco ordering our patio furniture but in the end, it came and we LOVE it! This has been one of our longest and most involved projects, about a year in the making, but in the end it is exactly what we wanted and we use it when ever we can.

Got to have a picture with the dogs!

My husband also got the grill he's been eyeing for a long time now, The Big Green Egg, and we have been grilling when ever we can. He even built a custom table/cart for it.

Cooking our first meal on the grill.

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Last but not least, we had family and friends over for the 4th of July. Riley and Grace got to spend some time with a little human friend, our God-son! They do so good with him and his antic, it makes me happy for the day when we have our own little one running around.

And to end my rather lengthy and random blog post, here are some pictures I took of Riley and Grace in honor of July 4th. Thanks for reading or even skimming (I don't blame ya) over my post. I plan on posting more, now that life seems to have calmed down a bit, or maybe I've learned to handle it better.