No Poo at Dinner!

Last night we took a chance and took the baby out to dinner.  Some nights he doesn't poo until 10 pm, but we have been very vigilant about taking him right out after dinner and then using the commanding voice to see if he will poo and last night we were successful!  Why do I mention specifically a "commanding voice"?

We were told a story at one of our meetings about some veterans in Southeastern's Paws for Patriots program who were working with their assistance dogs and one veteran was listening while another was working with his newly acquired dog.  After listening to him for a bit, he jumped in and said, "Soldier, are you asking your dog or telling him?"

I think about that story a lot.  Mostly because I don't naturally have a commanding voice.  So, I now find myself trying all sorts of different voices when I am out there with Coach because maybe, just maybe, that voice wasn't commanding enough. Perhaps it should be deeper. A bit more stern. No, that didn't work.  How about not so deep, but definitely serious. It's like the actor's studio in our back yard. I should add accents.

OMG.  The nuanced Busy Busy command. Honestly! Coach is my first puppy to mark the distinction between command and normal and happy voices.  He's very smart.

Back to dinner.  We had a 5 pm dog dinner and a 5:10 poo. Woot!  In the real world, people don't talk about poo this much, but in a Southeastern Guide Dog puppy raiser world, poo is very much on our minds: when they last pooped, have they pooped, was it a good poop, etc.  I had no idea I was going to care this much about excrement when I started this gig.

Anyway, since we had our poo, we were good on poo at least for a couple of hours, if not the rest of the evening.  The girls were arriving at 6 and Fred was able to elicit a pee at 5:55 (Fred's commanding voice comes very easily).  Coach is rather like a horse, saving it all up for one tremendously long pee that must be terribly satisfying for him.  Mind you, this is in spite of being taken out and given opportunities to pee. Again, commanding voice or my lack thereof! 

Lauren, Allison, Cheryl and Amber with Casa Tina's in the background.  I have Coach in front of me and have my arms circling him.

So here we are outside of Casa Tina's before our successful dinner outing. Allison's camera has given us a very flattering soft focus, and Coach is a bit of dark blur at the bottom.  But rest assured, he was awesome at dinner and slept through almost all of it.