Today is a great day. One year ago today we brought home a little scared dog who wasn’t sure what was going on. One year later, she is an integral part of our family and we couldn’t imagine our lives without her.

Portrait by Jennifer Bailey Photography

She has come such a long way. This year has definitely not been easy, but every step of the way has been worth it. It was quite the challenge to figure out how she fit into our family, and into our lifestyle but I can safely say now that we are finally there! She has found her place and is very confident and happy about it.

Portrait by Jennifer Bailey Photography

I must apologize for not writing the 11 month update, but I wanted to save it all for this post.

Wellie has been doing so well that we can’t even believe she’s the same dog! She rarely has accidents in the house anymore and we don’t even really need to use the bells on the back door anymore as she lets us know when she has to go out. She still needs to go out quite a bit, but as long as we are able to let her outside, she doesn’t have any accidents.

Since day one, Wellie has had attitude and it still shines through every once and a while. We are making sure to keep working on making her realize that we are in charge, not her.

We still are crating – she doesn’t fully have her freedom back yet and we are moving very slowly with it. She now is allowed in the kitchen when we are gone out, but only sporadically. She is also allowed to sleep on the bed with us, but only every other night. We need to do this slowly so that she doesn’t think that she’s in charge.

One thing we’ve realized recently is that Corduroy is the top dog in our place. It was quite the surprise to realize this because she’s the most chilled dog of the bunch, but she is the only dog who can control the others and none of the other dogs ever bug her. Ever.

Corduroy and Wellie are still best buds and do pretty much everything together. It’s the cutest thing. Paddington and Wellie still don’t love each other totally, but they do love to play together but once they are done playing, they go to their separate corners.

One thing we realized over the Christmas holidays this year, was that Wellie was wagging her tail for us. I’d never noticed the absence of tail wagging, until I saw her actually doing it. It made me sad to realize that she wasn’t’ wagging it for so long, but made me so happy that she’s wagging it now and we know she is so happy to see us and be in our family.

Wellie is such a ham and LOVES the camera. She adores posing for portraits which is funny because Paddington and Corduroy are quite the opposite!

Wellie fiercely loves Thomas. Every evening she lays on his lap and gets him to pet her. She much prefers sitting with him, to sitting with me. When she sleeps on the bed, she is always pressed up against him (he doesn’t love this as much as she does! haha). It’s really wonderful to see the bond they’d developed and I know it will grow over the years.
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Firstly I must apologize for being over a week late with this post, but we’ve been busy getting ready for the holidays and finishing up everything that needed to be done this time of year.

We celebrated Wellie’s 2nd birthday this month and I made her a snazzy hat as well as amped up a few of her muffins to be some delicious pupcakes. I added bananas and extra blueberries (Wellie’s fave!) and of course, peanut butter icing. The dogs obviously LOVED them and ate them up probably a bit too fast!

We had some setbacks this month and I think it may have had something to do with the fact that Wellie was given up this time last year. She was given up on December 6th, three days before her 1st birthday in 2010. She remained at Animatch for three months before we brought her home and I think this time of year may have brought some feelings of stress and maybe even fears of abandonment back. I’m not sure what triggered them, but she ended up reverting back and was being really bad – peeing inside again, beating up Paddington, barking at everything, getting into things and the list went on. I’ll be honest, it was really tough for us as well and we were wondering what we did wrong.

We soldiered through and decided to tackle the housetraining issues with putting a bell on a string on the back door so she could tell us when she wanted to go out. The problem was that she was barking downstairs while we were upstairs and we thought it was just her barking at random things, but it was actually her telling us she wanted to go out. Not wanting to encourage the barking, we thought the bells may be a better alternative. And boy were we RIGHT!

Wellie, the smartypants that she is, only took 30 minutes to learn how to use them. Each time we let her out, we would take her paw and hit the bells and say “outside”. She figured it out so quickly and we haven’t had an accident inside since we put them up! Continue reading →

What a great month we’ve had! Wellie has grown into such a sweetheart.

On the housetraining front, I am very happy to report that she hasn’t had any accidents in our house since month 8! She did have two accidents at my in-law’s house but it was probably because we weren’t reading her signals correctly, so that’s our bad.

At home, she has been asking to go out to pee and poop – even when it’s raining! Every time she asks to go out and actually does something, my heart swells with pride – so proud of her!

In the past three weeks we’ve also made another leap forward in that Wellie is ok with being outside in the back yard without one of us standing at the back door. I am convinced that in her previous life, her owners must have left her outside for a long time because she was very self conscious about being left outside. Now she has gained the confidence to explore – even if Paddington and Corduroy don’t go out with her! We never leave the dogs outside for long, only as long as they want to be out there and ask to come back in, but this is great because I know it means she is getting more confident.

In terms of crate training, we are still using the crate overnight and once again in the morning after breakfast, but that’s it. She still is crated when we leave the house and will be for a while longer. She doesn’t mind being in there, and with me working from home, there is usually someone here with her anyways.

In the past month, Wellie has also calmed down quite a bit. She is more relaxed and more willing to play on her own. It’s so lovely and again, I am so proud of her.

One hilarious thing that happened this past week was so funny, I just have to tell you about it. I caught a bad cold last week and have been feeling down and out. I was drawing a bath for myself and as the tub filled, I went to check my email. A few minutes later I went back to see the progress of how it was filling and I found Wellie IN the tub! She had jumped right in to the tub filled with water and was playing around. It was so funny, I grabbed my camera and we had a little session. I then took her out and let her outside because she usually has to go to the bathroom after her bath….she then got REALLY muddy and I had to put her BACK into the tub to wash her off. I dried her off again and emptied the tub, and she jumped BACK in to play more! It was so hilarious!! I have never had a dog who actually LIKED baths! Please enjoy the images from her adventure.

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I must admit I am a few days late posting this, but it’s (mostly) good news that I bring!

We have had a month full of ups and downs, and we are still learning lessons.

We’ll start with a down: mid month, Wellie started throwing up a lot. During each incident, she’d vomit four times. This kept happening and after the third straight incident (the last being from 3am-4am), I brought her into the vet to see what was up. I was confused because her spirits were high, she was still eating and drinking normally, but she kept throwing up. The vet felt around and concluded that she probably ate something that was blocking her pyloric valve, causing the food to stay in her stomach and ferment, which then was uncomfortable so she would throw it up. He instructed us to keep our same diet (stew + muffins) but water it down to a slop-like consistency as well as give her a papaya supplement and some Nux Vomica for a week. That did the trick! Wellie didn’t throw up once after visiting the vet and we were very relieved that she was ok.

During her time of not feeling well, she had a few accidents. I honestly think these were accidents, and not “i’m-mat-at-you-adents”. Since her diet was all of a sudden really watery, she needed to pee a lot more and one day I forgot to let her out every hour and she had an accident on the floor. The same week she had a poop accident in the living room, but again, I’m chalking this up to her not feeling well.

We did have one true act of defiance last week, which was after she was feeling better and was a flashback to when she was doing it to let us know she was unhappy. I had a wedding consultation for my photography business and Thomas took the dogs into the basement. We do this for every consultation and he’s usually in the office or the basement. I guess Wellie got angry that she couldn’t come see me and peed on the couch RIGHT next to Thomas. From now on, she will be crated during my consultations. I think we got so excited at how well she was doing and let her have too much freedom too soon.

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I think this is the most excited I’ve ever been to update you on how our month went. I am thrilled to report that Wellie has not had an accident in the house since my last post!! This is such a huge accomplishment and it’s been such a great month.

Not only has she not had an accident inside, her brattiness seems to have been taken down a notch. She still has her moments, but overall she has been doing so well. We have been giving her a bit of freedom now that’s she’s proved that she’s earned it.

We are still going to be crating her throughout the day and overnight. I am pretty sure we’ll get her to sleep in her crate overnight until December but slowly give her a bit more freedom during the day.

It feels so great to be able to trust her a bit more. I think she is proud of it as well because as I mentioned before, she’s being quite a bit less bratty.

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I can’t believe it’s been six months since we brought Wellie home from Animatch and she became a part of our family.

This has been a good month. The dogs have finally settling into a routine of having me working from home and things are going well.

Initiating the routine for Wellie’s crating has been integral in her progress. It hasn’t been perfect, but she is so much better and we are feeling much more confident about her housetraining.

Every once and a while, Wellie regresses back and lets us know she’s unhappy about something – last week I was out the front speaking with my brother-in-law and Wellie peed in the front hallway because she was unhappy that I didn’t take her out there with me. Next time I’m speaking with someone outside, she’ll be outside, tethered to Thomas, or crated. We learn from our mistakes and move on!

We went to Toronto to visit with my parents this month and I’ve found that Wellie reverts back to her old self when we are in other people’s houses so we’ve been making sure to tether her at all times when she’s out of the crate. I made the mistake of letting her off at my parents house on a few occasions and she had two “accidents”. One was purely her letting me know she was mad, and the other she was playing around with Sonnet and she just stopped and pooped. I think maybe she didn’t realize how much she had to go.

Since we’ve been back home again we’ve been on track and there have been no accidents. We’ve even gone so far as to replace the rug in our living room, which we discovered after feeding some wires under it, that the dogs had been using it as a pee pad for goodness knows how long. Ew. We definitely rustled up some smells that day! Continue reading →