Raz has been shaping up over the past month now. He responds to basic commands, is usually walk-able on the leash, and when off the leash he doesn't do a Houdini and disappear. I have him sit and stay when putting food out and he doesn't go until released. Similarly he can be made to stay while playing fetch and I've worked him up to sitting while I hide his toy and then having him find it. With Zeke this game involved a high-speed, somewhat random search pattern, as if he was working against the clock. Raz is more casual, but also seems to be able to reason where the toy is hidden. He'll just trot over to where he thinks it is and then look and sniff it out in a couple seconds. Almost like he's saying "Well, this isn't a very challenging game, but I'll humor you."

Thursday night I weighed him in at 26 lbs. He's pretty much doubled in weight since we got him, passing Zane probably a week ago (he's at 23lbs). He's getting taller, but I should really start taking some regular photos with him next to a known sized object to see where and how he's growing. A tooth fell out earlier this week (yay!), one of the needle sharp fanglets in the front. Unfortunately that hasn't made his mouth any safer as a bunch of new teeth are coming in and that one will have a replacement shortly. The big molars in the back broke through the gums a couple days ago and danged if they aren't pretty sharp too. I still get regular holes in my hands and arms, but a lot less than when we first got him.

Which leads us to his main two problems: chewing everything and snacking on old poop. It only takes a few seconds for Raz to find and pretty much destroy some of Zane's toys. Frankly I'd start giving him toys if he'd just knock it off with the poop nibbling. Taking Raz into the woods to go bathroom requires extreme vigilance ... he treats it more as a foraging exercise, eating branches, plants, dirt, and less savory items. Another of his favorites is mulch. He chows down on the compacted grass mulch scraped out of the mower as readily as the garden mulch spread by our plants.

Puppy training was cancelled this last week due to a sick dog at the shelter. Meanwhile Raz had his second vet exam and they discovered he had some type of worms. So he's being treated for that, a generalized worm treatment, and has had a whole series of shots. I take him into work and we've been going on long walks most days during lunch. Faith takes him for another long walk in the evening and there's a fair bit of training and playing interspersed throughout the day. I think it's been a week and a half since his last potty house training incident (easy to confuse the two!), so perhaps that is behind us. Hopefully by Winter we'll have him trained like Zeke where we let him out the back door and say "go in the woods" and he'll go off to the bathroom and come back to the door all by himself (and without snacking!).

From observations so far he's a really smart dog. Perhaps a bit too smart as he seems to be trying to train and manipulate us at times. He and Zane show a number of similarities. Sometimes I think "man, dealing with a 2 year old is much easier than a puppy" and other times it's "kids are great, at least I can reason with a two year old." Which just goes to show how crazy it gets.