It's been a pretty good week. Apart from a cat in the garden incident.
We started with quite a big win. My friend and her dog came over for a coffee. They've been here before but it's been a while since George has had another dog in his space and he is less tolerant of visitors than he was previously. So I wasn't sure how it would go. I put all the toys and food out of sight just in case of any resource guarding.
Despite the risk of bumping into neighbours, I decided that we would go out to meet them at the front and then walk back in together. George gets so excited when we have visitors that he likes and I thought he would be over-threshold and unable to listen if they walked in. Also, the doorbell/knock is very stimulating.
He barked at them at first but once he saw who it was, he stopped. He was very stimulated, as he often is in this space, keeping an eye out for the neighbours.
We all went in together and he was pretty calm. His medication would have just been kicking in as well which probably helped. Unusually, he stayed quite close to me while I made us coffee while his friend had a good explore.
We then went out to the car to go for a walk. This is the first time he has ever had another dog in my car with him. So we decided to go for a short drive for the first time. Both dogs settled very well.
When we got to the walking spot, unfortunately there was a person near as I was parking the car and I knew George was going to bark. Which he did of course - somewhat startling for his very tolerant friend!
He did very well on the walk. We walked closer to people than we have done in a very long time (without any reactions) and we were fortunate to not see any other dogs.
After the lovely (but hot) walk, George snoozed for most of the afternoon. A successful visit and outing overall!
The cat in the garden kicked off our most stressful day this week. As I was letting him out to the garden for his last toilet break at 10pm, there was a black cat on our fence. Cue extreme reaction from George.
I brought him straight back in but he was pretty over-stimulated for quite a while after that. Apologies to our neighbours. Cats are still a massive trigger, particularly if on our property.
I'm still completing the mindset tracker and we've had a couple of green days (great days) this week, mostly yellow days (we tried), and one red day (the cat day).
I saw an idea on Reddit about making a win jar. You write down your 'wins' on slips of paper so that when you're having a tough day, you can raid the jar and remind yourself of all your wins.
I keep track of our wins on a notes app on my phone but I liked the visual reminder of this idea. So I made our win jar. There are a few things in there already 😊
