Puppy gets a name

My name is Kahuna Ke'o Li'i.  But you can call me Ke'o for short.

Ke'o continually surprises us with how smart (and manipulative) he can be.  He's learned to climb stairs, but we're still working on going down stairs.  He can go down two or three stairs, at the most, without one of us having to help or carry him.  Ke'o seems to have found his "voice" also and surprised both himself and me when he barked for the first time this week.  Fortunately, he uses his voice fairly judiciously in play or to alert us that he's p-o'd about something.  He hasn't barked at anything else, like the front door opening or at people walking by or at cars driving on the road.  That alone makes me feel that he's a pretty special dog.

 

Puppy's first play date

Yesterday we went to our friends' house for a puppy play date with this guy:

Now, the very idea of my 2.2 lb, 11 week old puppy playing with a 75+ lb, 2 year old German Shepherd did give me some cause for concern for a minute or two, but Blitz (the German Shepherd) is such a well behaved dog.  He's probably the most calm and gentle 2 y/o large breed I've seen and that speaks volumes about how well his people, Dan and Karin, have trained him.  In fact, they're two of my biggest role models in how to raise Puppy right. 

Introducing dogs, especially ones that are so mis-matched like these two, can be over-stimulating for both dogs.  Puppy was shaking and clingy for the first few minutes while Blitz checked him out and settled down from all the excitement.  But once he got down on the floor, Puppy held his own and played well with the big dog, even egging on Blitz to annoyance.  3 hours later and this is what I got...

He slept this way the entire ride home, completely oblivious to the world.  When we got home, he stumbled out of his crate, went straight to his bed and fell right back to sleep.

And he wasn't the only one.

It was SO nice to have a quiet house for a few hours!