Bella - Day 1

Bella is doing great.

Oh Bella is just a love and so polite! We took her for a walk right away and she walked right by our side. She is excellent about coming back to you & enthusiastic about it! She loves chasing snow balls. Buddy needs work on recalling and as I said, he likes to be walking in front of you all the time. To him, "heel" means slow down slightly--which we really try to enforce now that the ground can be slippery (it's a work in progress).

Back to Bella, we were a little worried that she did not go potty (just to pee even) but after about 2 hours of being around here, I was in the basement with her throwing a toy and she would bring it back and drop it (wow!) and she suddenly stopped playing and started sniffing around, so I took her outside and success! I think it is because we are not used to having a female and Marlene had said a long time ago, females just do not urinate as much as males do because they do not do that "marking" behavior that male dogs do. Bella has already learned where the door is and when we ask if she wants to go outside, she runs right to it.

Jeff took her for a walk this morning and she went potty of all kinds with no problems. Oh, and there were other dogs in the park this morning that Jeff said Bella played with really nicely. She even let a puppy get her down on her back--awww. There was a boxer dog there also, and if you remember Sadie from training, boxers are very "growly", Bella did not like that much, so maybe she's more girly than you think! She slept soundly last night and we didn't hear a peep out of her.

I work most days until noon or so, at home, so right now Bella is sleeping next to my desk. She seems happy to be with whatever human is moving around the house. I have a building contractor coming in today to do some minor work, it should not be too loud or scary for Bella. She does seem to hear every new sound, but she has no bad reaction to it, she just notices it is different. I'm sure we have more traffic around our house than you do, but she is getting used to that. She does not seem at all interested in Buddy's toys unless we're throwing them (maybe one of those girl things where she doesn't want to touch some ucky boy's toys! ha).

We do have a training class that we attend tonight which Marlene teaches. It is a bunch of German shepherd puppies, then whatever Occupaws dogs Marlene brings and Ernie with Sadie, and then us. We only started taking Buddy to give him more exposure to other dogs. So we will take Bella tonight.

I apologize if Buddy came to your house dirty--I actually had just given him a bath before we left and he was smelling good. Then we got to the parking lot to do the exchange and Bella and Buddy had mud flying within about 2 seconds, but our intentions were good! I think we all needed a bath by the time we left.

Apologize profusely for us to Stormy for his overzealous behavior!