11.19 an old woman stopped margot and i on our walk to tell me that she thought margot took treats from me so gently. she does! even when i'm trying to give her something hard to take like a bunch of shreds of chicken, she is really aware that i don't want to feel her teeth on me ever. no formal lesson required, sometimes margot used to take from me too roughly but now she is very gentle. margot is so aware of things i don't like, which is why i feel like she's not a very barky dog and mostly communicates with me through sighs. she is the queen of the exasperated huff.

anyway this woman was talking to me about how she had dogs all her life and now she can't have one anymore because she's too old. this is helpful perspective, it is not something to be taken for granted that i'm well enough in body & mind to care for my dear mutt. i will probably have animals all my life because i love them so much, but dog-owning years are limited. it's sweet!

11.9 Walking Margot this morning and she was offering me a ton of engagement, I was like go smell the grass but she really wanted to talk and hangout. I wasn’t sure what to do but then I thought of how my parents keep talking about bringing her to an outdoor brewery, a situation I do not think she could handle. Leaving the question of other dog bump-ins aside, it’s a great goal maybe actually. I would love if Margot was the type of dog that could sit happily beside me and be chill, and she would also love that because it would expand her little world.

I’ve had phases of focus on getting Margot comfortable with sitting and calmly observing her environment / paying attention to me. I used to practice feeding her one of her meals on a towel in the backyard. Today I had her do a down on the sidewalk, which she held for about five minutes. A few issues with our communication:

Down is obviously the cue to get her in position, and I’ve tried to use “relax” as the cue that we’re going to stay in the position for a while. It’s hard to figure out how to effectively space out the rewarding. Over time she’ll give small signals she’s chilling out - shifting onto one of her hips, looking away from me calmly (instead of staring straight at me waiting for a treat) and then looking at me. Her best moment was about 4 minutes in, she shifted her hips to essentially prop herself up on my leg. This is huge, especially because we were near a noisy road.

Sometimes she gets frustrated in the space between being rewarded, and I want to keep the experience as emotionally level as possible. I also can’t tell if she’s genuinely confused or trying to trick me. About three times when I wasn’t rewarding her, she got up into a close sit (this is sort of her default position when she's waiting for a command), and then I directed her back into a down and then rewarded her. Concerned about her essentially purposefully changing positions as a way to get rewarded for, like, resetting the down. Also towards the end of our five minutes she started fidgeting, and then eventually she started whipping out other tricks until she got to my favorite, which I basically always reward her for, play dead. It was cute to see it on the sidewalk but then I ended it lol. Also giving her the treat very close to the ground was super helpful in this set up, she basically needs to not have an excuse to get up in any capacity.

I do wonder if a noticeably calmer dog, on command, is possible for Margot (and me). Today we did this before playing fetch, so tomorrow I'll try the down after exercise, and maybe we try to work up to 10 minutes in the next week or so. This sort of work on focus tends to exhaust her as much as physical exercise. She's snoring now.

9.25 it is my dog, margot’s, fourth birthday. this is according to her adoption paperwork, and i assume her birthday is just a rough guess. margot only had 8 weeks of her life before i came into it. all i know from the before times is that she was born on a native american reservation in rural north dakota.

my ex caught word of a litter of black lab puppies at a shelter 12 hours from where we lived at the time. he had a black lab growing up. we looked at the puppies and most of them were reserved, but a few remained, so we made an appointment to see margot, who at the time was named gravy (it was near thanksgiving). we didn’t know if she’d be a boy or a girl. we woke up at 2am to get to the shelter around 2pm. as we crossed over from montana to north dakota, we started tossing out names. i don’t remember the boy name and i really didn’t want a boy. if she was a girl, jack wanted margaret. i thought it would be weird to name a puppy margaret because that was my coworker’s name. so i said she could be margaret but mostly margot.

we got to the shelter and discovered we had reserved the only remaining girl puppy. thank god. they put us in a room and delivered margot. she dove into my crotch.

what were we supposed to be assessing her for? what could she have done in our ten minute meeting that would have had us drive back, puppyless? she played with the pink elephant toy we brought her. jack and i looked at each other. the shelter people snapped a picture of us and out we went, not even a leash or collar was required (of course we had one in the car), and i thought wow it really is so crazy here in north dakota.

margot slept on my lap the whole drive back, heavy and limp, never stirring or making a sound. as if he was cursing us, jack said: ashley, maybe she’s perfect.

i felt awkward around her for the first few months. it was strange to use her name, which she obviously had no attachment to. when we plopped her down in our backyard, i remember jack and i saying: how do we tell her to pee? go potty? go potty, margot, we said to her a thousand times as she walked around the backyard. jack, taking her from her crate for the mid-night bathroom: go potty, i could hear from our window, gopottygopottygopotty, and then a big celebration would ensue before the door swung back open.

in every picture of her from the first few months, she’s on a leash. she’s on a leash tethered to my desk at home. she’s on a leash in the car picking up jack from work. she’s on a leash laying in bed. it seemed insane to me when jack suggested she might walk off leash with us at our nearby park. yes we fed and sheltered her, but she didn’t seem particularly compelled by either of us as individuals. why would she stay nearby? i agreed to let her off leash after we discovered she loved boiled chicken. she would amble behind whoever was holding the chicken. i was nervous the entire time and i still am.

she would go to bed around 7 every night when she was a baby. she cried in her crate. the internet says to use sound. we tried to play white noise but it didn’t work. edm worked. at night, margot went to her edm lounge. often around 10 or 11, we’d start to miss her. we would wake her up and bring her to sit in bed with us (we always thought this must be so bad, certainly inadvisable, but we loved to do it and she usually went back to bed peacefully). she was always so docile. sleepy puppy time was the one time i never felt compelled to clip her leash on. she would roll on the comforter and show us her soft pink belly and we would blow raspberries into it and give it kisses. worship the pink belly, pay respects to the pink belly, how i love your little soft pink belly that smells like baby, you are the sleepiest puppy, puppy of the world, margotmargotmargot.