56 Weeks of Cecil

I missed the opportunity for a post with any real fanfare and will thusly have to resort to the anticlimactic: Mr. Cecil's been with us for... more than a year. See, a drumroll would have been ridiculous there. According to the meet-our-new-dog post from last year, we officially got him on October 8th. Oh well. It's not like we would have baked him a cake or anything had we been more on top of things.

One of the absolute best new skills he's learned lately is the ability to go to off-leash dog parks and not run off into the sunset/after a squirrel/into traffic. Well, honestly, I suspect he's had this skill for a while now, but what's happened recently is that we've had the courage to let him go off-leash and trust him to be a good puppy. Fueled by our own paranoia, we've spent the past year carting around a 50-foot leash on all his adventures to give him the feeling of freedom while still giving us humans a sense of security. Couple that with a plastic baggie full of scraps of american cheese and salami, to be meticulously and consistently deployed when someone's little canine legs carry him back to us, and we've managed to hoodwink him into thinking that it's the best thing EVER to stick with us.

That's him. The fact that he somehow gets the concept of trails mystifies and amuses me.

There's also the convenient part about him being a teensy bit afraid of the whole world, which I suspect keeps him from wandering too far. But also the salami.

Anyway. Being able to let him run and explore and smell the smells and meet other puppies (see? they're not scary!) has been such a turning point. He's gaining confidence, which makes him less likely to have a meltdown on a structured walk when he sees a cat or another dog, and we're feeling better by seeing him make a lot of great progress. All that, PLUS, we don't have to do any fancy double-dutch footwork to keep from being taken out at the ankles by a bright orange leash if he starts running at full tilt. Win, win, win.

His favorite part is always smelling the smells.

This weekend, we spent an hour wandering around a dog park a couple miles from our house. No fences, no leashes. Just acres and acres of trails and fields and a pond. So much to sniff.

One of my other favorite things about Mr. Cecil? He had no interest whatsoever in swimming in that pond. We are so. darn. lucky.