The Great Wide World

We've finally received the ok from our vet to take our dog outside. So far her view of "outside" has been limited to what she can see on our approximately 12 square meter porch on the 13th floor, or being held in our arms as we walk around the block.

So it was no surprise that on our first adventure out the door, she planted her little bottom and shook. I had brought a few meat sticks with me to entice her. After some persuasion, she would walk about 5 or 10 feet then sit again and shake. Altogether we might have been outside 10 minutes.

We tried again later in the day, and her times between stopping began to lengthen. We managed to walk about a half hour, and she seemed to enjoy it.

Since then we've had a few more successful walks and she is learning that outside is fun! People leave a lot of interesting things on the ground that she likes to try to eat. It's also a place where the big people seem to go wild with excitement when she goes potty, so that's a bonus.

This is all good because it prepared us for what happened this morning. We want her to learn to go potty outside now rather than on the porch, so I thought it would be good to run her down right away. She's pretty anxious to get outside first thing, so I was all dressed with her leash in hand when I took her out of the pen. I held her in the elevator so she didn't get any ideas to go until we got outside, but as we were going down I realized, "I forgot my keys."

This might not be such a bad thing if Erik weren't traveling and it weren't 5:20 a.m., but both those things were true. I tried to buzz back in after about 20 minutes, but of course the kids didn't hear it. We walked another 20 and tried again. Still no luck. Again at 6:30 I tried because I knew Ethan's alarm would go off then. He almost let the doorbell go, thinking I would get it, but then had the wisdom to think, "But maybe it's mom!"

So we had a nice long walk in the great wide world this morning and now she's all tuckered out. I think she's gonna like it.