Day 7 & 8: Soooo Busy!!

I didn't get a chance to blog last night. The air conditioning in our room quit working and we ended up having to move rooms and then... move rooms again! It was a little hectic to say the least but our room is great now and I'm really thankful my parents were here to help us! 

Day 7: Yesterday, Jennifer, Sobe's trainer, taught the first half of the class. We worked on behavior disruption. "Nuzzle", "Over", "Kisses", "Lap", and "Touch" are the 5 different behavior disruption commands. We will be using all of them except for "touch" because that is where the dog comes and places there paw on the child's leg and with Benjamin's mobility, we don't want to train Sobe to come and "touch" him while he's standing and knock him over.

We went outside with Jessa in the afternoon and worked on distractions. Here's Sobe and I: (video)

I just want to say, I realized again today how important it is to wait for training and instructions from 4 Paws before trying to learn everything or worrying about different commands until you're here and have been correctly trained. Each dog is so different and each of their tasks are specific for their kiddo. Today we learned that we should never have Sobe "sitting" while she has her balance harness on. She is a mobility and balance dog so she should always be standing or in a "down" while she is working. We only have 4 or so dogs in our class doing this specific kind of work so this rule only applies to us. 

Sunday night, we headed to the mall with Excel (dog - huge white doodle!) and Lauren (handler) for some serious mall time. We left our kids at home and it was some great training time! (btw, the mall closes at 6 on sunday) We practiced retrieval, distractions, nuzzling, and door buttons. It works out great to have a third person there to help out. That happened to be me last night. I would "drop" my shoe for them to retrieve or at one point I started excitedly talking and freaking out trying to distract them. I grabbed a shopping cart and whizzed about them. We really put them to the test. We even put them in an "under" in the food court area and walked several yards away and made them stay like that for several minutes and then "come" to us. It was a good "work out"!!! 

Training Day 8: We left Benjamin at the hotel with gammy and gobah today. He definitely needed a down day. It was awesome for Ben and I. We could 100% focus on Sobe and training and know that Benjamin was having a great time as well. 

We started by going over seizure alerting. This was pretty amazing to watch! The dogs can alert to seizures in several different ways. They pre-alert: which is where they smell/sense a seizure going to happen before it does.  (this could happen two seconds before the seizure or 24 hours!!) They also are trained to alert when the seizures happens. So we practice for both. Obviously, Benjamin doesn't understand imitating his own seizures so that will leave it to me to practice at home. The dogs start going crazy when they see you "seizing"! It's amazing! Ben says I need to practice "my seizing" cause Sobe just looked at me funny and then sat on me when we were practicing tonight! hahahah We were cracking up! We're going to have the trainers help us tomorrow! (btw, seizures are not funny at all... and you can only joke about them if they happen to you/your child - otherwise you don't get to joke... sorry! that's just the rules!! :) 

Next, we practiced tethering. Tethering is the process by which the child is prevented from wandering away or eloping due to being tethered to the service dog. I'm super excited about this. As Benjamin becomes more mobile, yet doesn't understand concepts of "getting lost", or standing still for a few minutes or waiting patiently, this will be extremely helpful. People often just think, "well, why don't the parents just keep a better eye their children?" It's really not that simple. I'll never forget the day I was at Doernbecher's Children hospital trying to talk to the pharmacist! There was a line behind me, Benjamin was super cranky and did not want to be held and was trying to get away. I kept grabbing him back but he was screaming and I could not hear a word the pharmacist was saying. Finally, I just let him crawl around so I could finish my conversation and get out of there. I swear it was only a few short minutes but when I looked around he was gone!! And it's not like he responds or comes when  I call his name... I was freaking out!! I finally found him down the main hall in some other kid's wagon looking at the fish tank!! I still can't believe it! I lost my non-walking 6 yr. old kid!

Here's Ben and Sobe practicing tethering with Peg. Sobe's job is to stay in a "down" position no matter what: (video)

This afternoon we hit the malls again. We had some great one on one time with Jennifer and Sobe did awesome!! (If you notice, I'm not getting as many pictures... that's because I'm so busy working!!) 

After dinner, we headed to the service dog park! It's super close to the Homewood Suites at Wright University. It's the only "service dog park" in the country! (awesome, since we are NEVER allowed to take our service dogs to a normal dog park). 

Here's Sobe and Benjamin playing ball... one of their favorite things to do: (video)

We're headed to bed early tonight because we have an early morning mini training session before our actual day begins!!!