Archer and Ziggy: Yesterday, we turned three months old. Our human, Jules, had planned to help us post an update, but he had to take our big sister Kayla to the vet. She hurt herself really bad on Saturday.
We went for our first walk around the neighbourhood on Saturday. We did amazing! Our humans say that walking us for 15 minutes, three time a day, around the property, from the day we came home, was one of the best things they could have done for us.
When we finished walking around the neighbourhood, we were so tired, we crashed on the deck.
Anyway, after the walk, Kayla jumped wrong going back down the stairs, injuring both knees. Because she is a crazy Husky, she refuses to slow down and keeps reinjuring herself.
This had made us all miserable because she isn’t allowed to go on walks with us or play with us, and we—including Kayla—don’t understand this. Kayla doesn’t understand she is a 12-year-old with arthritis. And we just want to play with her all the time because we love her! She wants to play with us, too, but she’s also annoyed with us because when it comes time to play, she remembers that she is in a lot of pain.
She is on some extra meds at the moment, so we all hope she will be better soon. We all really miss playing and walking together!
On Thursday, we had our 12-week wellness check-up and vaccines. We are both incredibly healthy and MAMMOTH for our age.
Archer: I weighed 7.5 kg.
Ziggy: I weighed 7.0 kg.
Archer and Ziggy: We are bigger than the average six-month-old Beagle! We aren’t fat, just very tall for our age and muscular. It will be interesting to see how big we become.
We’ve made some other great milestones. We are pretty much house trained. Overnight, we go anywhere from 7 to 11 hours sleeping without having to go pee. If we do wake up in the middle of the night, it’s normally sometime between 01:30 and 02:00. After going out, we will play in our kennel for about 30 minutes before we settle back off to sleep.
If we go more than 7 hours at night without getting up, our humans have learned to leash us immediately after letting us out of our kennel, or we make it just outside of the door and pee on the deck. There is no time to mess around with our bladders in the morning. After our naps, sometimes it is up to an hour before we have to go out.
Sometimes we don’t always have to go at the same time.
Ziggy: Sometimes, I pretend I have to go out to pee, when in fact, I only want to go out to goof around in the grass.
Archer: If Ziggy has to go pee and I don’t have to, I’ll force myself to pee. I really like getting a piece of liver, so I make sure to pee each time I go into our outside run, even if I peed 20 minutes ago.
Archer and Ziggy: We both can do stairs now! This has made our humans lives so much easier. Both of our humans aren’t always available to help with washroom breaks. Carrying over 30lbs of squirming big puppies up and down nine stairs was starting to get really dangerous.
Archer: I figured out the stairs way before Ziggy. First, I figured out how to go up the stairs because I was really motivated to follow Kayla one day. And I just did it!
Going down the stairs was the same. I had my harness on, so I knew it was time for a walk. I really wanted to go, so down the stairs I ran! Once I decided I could run up and down the stairs, there was no going back. Unless I’m very tired, I hate it if someone tries to carry me up or down the stairs.
Also, I can jump up on the couch, now! My humans are in so much trouble!
Ziggy: It took me a couple weeks to learn how to go up the stairs. I was just really scared.
Archer: Ziggy, do you understand how weird that is? You were the first to fly off of furniture, leaping before looking, but stairs?
Ziggy: Yeah, well you were a chicken jumping off of furniture and fly up and down stairs without any regard, so who is the weird one?
As I was saying, it took me some time to not be afraid of going up the stairs. So, my humans decided to teach me in baby steps. They would put me on the third step from the top, and I’d run up those stairs like they were nothing. Over the next couple of weeks, they increased the number of stairs until I became a rock star at going up the stairs!
Going down was a similar process. I tried it once on my own from the top and slipped down the next three stairs. It scared me so bad, I’d whine at the top of the stairs.
After I stopped showing so much anxiety around stairs, my humans decided to try getting me to walk down stairs, starting with the third stair from the bottom, gradually increasing the number of stairs.
Today, for the first time, I ran down the stairs from the very top! I got a huge treat for that, so now I won’t stop!
Archer and Ziggy: We are both really well-trained and now automatically sit for certain things, like leash on and off, food, treats, leaving different areas. Jules will have to do a separate post on training. For now, Jules tells us to tell you to check out Dr Ian Dunbar.
We are also great nappers, not just great nighttime sleepers. That will also be another post.
We can also both be on Jules’ lap while he is eating and won’t beg or try to steal his food. Though, it did take one correction to get to that point in our lives.
As far a Beagles go, we are smashing the stereotypes. Our humans say it’s because they started to train us from day one and didn’t have a “Puppies will be puppies/ Beagles will be beagles,” attitude. They think we will be the rock stars of our puppy classes, which we start on Saturday.
We say, it’s a trap!