My sister and her husband welcomed a new dog into their world 3 months ago. Dennis is almost 2 years old but was raised  in a kennel/farm/breeder type of environment so never learned about stairs or car rides or household noises like washing machines or TV’s. Dennis also never learned some of the basic commands like sit or come. My sister describes their world as training a puppy who is fully grown! This means some of the normal training techniques, such as gently pushing on their back end as you say “Sit” or picking them up and removing them from the couch saying “OFF!” don’t work and have to be adapted. (Dennis weighs 48 lbs).

This week I invested in a new Chromebook to help me run Tree Toad. I like to think I am a fairly techno-savvy individual but having this new laptop and having to learn a different way of using the track-pad and using google docs and transferring over files has made me feel like an old dog trying to learn new tricks. Everything I try to do is slow and cumbersome and I will admit there were a few times I have been completely stumped even after using the help features. (and yes I have thought of pitching the damn thing out the door on more than one occasion). What I have learned in the last few days is that I learn differently than I used to - it takes me a couple of read-throughs of the steps or in some cases I need to read each step as I complete it. I also recognize that my capacity to learn is different in the morning vs. at night and that I am not at my best if I am feeling a time crunch to learn something new.

The moral of these stories - you have to learn the basics first, sometimes you have to go slow to go faster and lots of loving kindness through any learning goes a very long way.