Thursday, December 18, 2008

One of these things is NOT like the others..


Bella and I are visiting Elisa's house for the next week...


Bruce and Elisa got their girls a puppy for christmas and are babysitting her sister until she goes home (Greg and Brooke's house).

I was excited to see how much bigger Bella was since they are all (to the best of our knowledge) the same age; Sadie and Shay are golden-cockers and Bella is a pure golden.




Can you tell which one is mine and which are theirs!?! :)


Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Bella's Tricks...

So, I'm trying to train Bella to do all sorts of things. I might have started a few too many, so I'm not going to add anything just yet. But, if you have anything you can think of that would be fun for her to learn, feel free to let me know! :)


Here are her tricks so far:

Sit
Stay
Shake (shaking hands, not her body)
Lay down
Crawl
Roll over
and Jump

Some of these need a little more work. I want her to be able to eventually do some of them without the hand signals (especially lay down and crawl... those ones hurt my hands because she scratches them all up). She can sit without a signal now!

It's so much fun to train her, cause she's a lot more motivated by food than my rat was. :)

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Rat Olympics 2008!!!

Well, it finally happened... the semester is now over! I had a great time learning all sorts of things this semester. I'm sad some of my classes are over, but happy that I get a 3 1/2 week break before starting another BUSY semester! :)

Yesterday morning we had our Rat Olympics! I was pretty nervous and figured Splinter wouldn't do much of anything under pressure (mostly because of the people standing around and all the noise). We started the hour getting Splinter all warmed up...

There was a rat that went through the maze in 16 seconds and I figured we were doomed on that one. We gave him a couple warm up runs through the maze while the teacher checked other tricks. When she came back we were ready. I put splinter at the begining and he made it to the end in 9 seconds!!! No one beat it!

Next Splinter got to show off his Skinner box abilities (pressing the levers for food), he did well with this one too! Each rat had to show the maze, Skinner box and then their special trick. Splinter actually did his special trick! He didn't do it too well, but he did it and I was definately a suprise!

For his special trick, Splinter showed them how he could get up on his wooden platform when we said UP. Then he would stand on the platform real tall when we motioned to him. But his best trick by far was how he can walk. He didn't walk too far, but when I worked with him before he was walking all the way across the table (which is about three feed wide)!

Well, now it's time for Christmas!! I need to potty train Bella and then I'm going to be traveling and visiting family!!! :) Hurray!