stairs – YourDesignerDog

Random Sadie Photos #15

yourdesignerdog — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 06:00:33 +0000

To Climb or Not To Climb?

yourdesignerdog — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 07:00:49 +0000

“Should I go, Mom? Do you think it’s OK?”

This post is part of the BlogPaws Wordless Wednesday blog hop.

Re-Learning the Stairs

yourdesignerdog — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 09:00:58 +0000

Sadie is almost three years old now and has gone up and down countless flights of stairs. But there is one particular set of stairs she’s never traversed on her own – the main stairs up to the second floor apartment where we live. Sadie is fine with the stairs in the office because they’re carpeted. She’s comfortable with the brick steps up to the front door and even with the rugged wooden steps off of our back deck. But shiny, slippery, interior wooden stairs were out of the question. If she was a bigger dog I may have worked on convincing her to try those stairs. But since she’s small enough to carry and I knew we would be getting those stairs carpeted eventually, I decided to err on the safer side and just carry her up and down those slippery steps. But now the time has finally come. We just had carpet installed on ‘the’ stairs. All I need to do is convince Sadie that the stairs are now safe and she will no longer be carried up or down them anymore.

I started the process at the top of the stairs. Big mistake. I spent valuable time trying to convince Sadie to step off the landing, but she just wouldn’t go. Eventually I took her off the landing and placed her on the top step to get her moving downward, but she just stood on that top step and refused to move. After more negotiations, which Sadie won, I gave up and carried her down the stairs. We went outside for a potty break. When we came back in, Sadie stepped up to the bottom step, then looked back at me. All I said was “Go ahead” and she shot up those stairs like a bolt of lightening. I couldn’t have been more proud of her.

But going down the stairs was still a problem. Sadie did not want to step off the landing. I tried luring her down the stairs with food, but Sadie has never been very food motivated. I tried throwing a squeaky ball down the stairs, hoping she would chase after it, but she just stared sadly at me until I went and got it for her. Just when I was running out of ideas, the doorbell rang. Sadie raced down those steps without a second thought, wanting to know who was at that door. All it took was that one distraction for Sadie to finally stop thinking about how scary the steps were and start thinking about what’s exciting at the bottom of them. From then on, Sadie happily goes up and down the stairs with ease. I can’t believe I went so long having to carry her, because life is so much sweeter when I can have free hands on the stairs.

This post is part of the Thoughtless Thursday blog hop hosted by Ruckus the Eskie, Love Is Being Owned By a Husky, and M.K. Clinton.

This post is also part of the Thursday Barks and Bytes blog hop hosted by 2 Brown Dawgs and Heart Like A Dog.

Photo Avoidance Mischief

yourdesignerdog — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:00:06 +0000

This weekend it took me over fifty attempts to get the above photo. Sadie was sitting on the front steps, watching the humans do more yard work. Something about her pose struck me as cute, so I decided I would take a picture of her. I put down my rake for what I thought would be a couple seconds to snap a photo, and didn’t pick it up again for twenty minutes. Sadie was just absolutely refusing to be photographed. She must have tried every avoidance technique she could think of, from running down the stairs to get away to scratching at the door to get back in the house. She stubbornly refused to look at the camera, and when that didn’t stop me from trying to get a good picture, she got more mischievous. Sadie started looking at the camera, and then as soon as she heard the camera focus, she quickly looked away, leaving me with lots of blurry photos. In the end I just had to be more stubborn than Sadie and kept trying until I finally got the perfect photo.

Here are a few of my favorite avoidance photos:

“Ooh, what’s over here?”

“Now there’s something more interesting on this side!”

“I wonder what’s on my nose…”

“See, I’m looking at the camera. What? Now you expect me to smile?”

“That’s it, I quit!”

This post is part of the Monday Mischief Pet Blog Hop.

Stop and Stair

yourdesignerdog — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 09:00:23 +0000

Today on our way out of the office Sadie changed her normal routine. It wasn’t a big change, but it seemed really deliberate. It left me thinking for the rest of the day about whether she made a random, one time choice or if she actually learned from past experience and planned her actions accordingly.

Every day when we leave our office, Sadie runs ahead of me down the stairs. She waits until I lock the office door, then heads down to the first landing. She waits there until I give her the signal that she can continue. She repeats the process of waiting at the landing for my OK twice more, until we reach the ground floor. There she waits in front of the door for me to hook her leash onto her harness and then we can leave. I always put her collar and harness on before we leave our office, but I wait for the leash until we reach the bottom of the stairs. I’m always worried that if I’m not fast enough and she has the leash on, it will pull and make her trip and fall down the stairs. So when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I have to reach down and clip on her leash, often dropping my purse and other bags in the process. Eventually I get it hooked correctly and head out of the building to go home.

But today when we got to the final landing and I gave the signal for Sadie to go down the last of the stairs, she didn’t move. I figured she was just waiting for me, so I started down the last little flight ahead of her, assuming she would follow right behind me. But she still didn’t budge. I told her to come, but she just looked at the leash in my hand and stayed put. So I walked back towards the stairs and Sadie stretched down a couple of steps until her harness was level with my hands. From that position it was really easy to clip on her leash without dropping my bags or putting anything down. As soon as the leash was clipped, Sadie happily trotted down the last few steps and waited for me to open the door.

So did Sadie notice how I usually struggle to clip on her leash at the bottom of the stairs and decide to help me out by staying at a higher level? She is sometimes startled when I drop my purse or other items as I’m bending to reach her. Did Sadie purposely stay above me to avoid falling objects? I’ll never know for sure the answers to these questions, but It seems to me that the more we repeat an action, the better Sadie gets at knowing what she needs to do in that situation and the best way to do it.

This post is part of the Thoughtless Thursday blog hop hosted by Ruckus the Eskie and Love is Being Owned By a Husky.

This post is also part of the Thursday Barks and Bytes blog hop hosted by 2 Brown Dawgs and Heart Like A Dog.

Thanks for liking us! Sadie and I really appreciate the love!