Back to the FUN stuff! (and Target, too!)

First things first! A couple of days ago a friend was tagged on Facebook in a picture of her dog modeling the T-Rex costume at Target. Sweet! The costumes are out! So I swung by on my way home from work tonight to see if I might be able to find Kaiser on any of the stuff he modeled during his photo shoot.

There weren't any costumes in the pet section, so I started scouring the store for the Halloween section to see if the pet costumes were by the people costumes. Score! In the far back corner of the store, there they were!

I found the skunk, the hot dog, the knight and the cowgirl (I think it was the same one, but I thought ours had been cuter...), but they didn't have all of the sizes available. Kaiser definitely was not on the small skunk or hot dog, though (that went to a terrier and a dachshund, respectively). I was looking for all of the small costumes and darn near missed it -- When all of the sudden, RIGHT in front of me, was Kaiser! He's a bee!!  :o)

I was thrown off because he's on the medium package. Truth be told, the costume he's wearing IS a medium (except for the head piece, that's small) because the costumes all ran crazy small. It sounded like they planned to put him on small packaging regardless, though, so who knows what happened. The medium package says it's for dogs up to 50lbs, so maybe they just think people will think he's a husky. Woe to the husky owner who thinks a medium will fit their dog, though! lol

I haven't decided if I'll actually make my dogs wear it at any point in time or if I'll just put the package away for safe-keeping (because YES, I bought one!). I didn't buy the winter coat because I just don't feel like we'd get any use out of that whatsoever, and the tag is smaller.  ;o)

I am so excited that they used my little man for a costume!!!

As I mentioned yesterday, Secret & Kaiser got to play after Kizzy had her fun. The drill setup from Kizzy's Novice exercises had an equal number of Intermediate/Advanced options to choose from, so I chose three at random. After I'd walked the third one a few times I realized that we'd actually done that one before. Oops. Oh well. At that point it was the sixth exercise I'd committed to memory that afternoon and there was no way I was going to try to retain a 7th.

In the weeks going into NADAC Champs we worked on nothing but speed work (and the dog walk), so it was nice to get back to some super fun handling exercises. I so much prefer this style of agility! After seeing just how nicely Kaiser went back to the tight work I started wondering if I made a mistake to focus so much on distance/speed (granted, that was mostly for Secret's benefit). Maybe he would have been better off to stay in a bit more handler focus. Who knows. Too late now. I was just happy to have my sassy, barky little man back and he was eager to play!

Secret did great, too! I popped those jumps right back up to 24" on her and she did great. Only dropped one bar the whole time and I'm sure it was my fault.

I'm thinking we're going to be doing a lot more AKC in 2014. My next decision, though, is a conflict the first weekend in December. There is a NADAC trial here at home (i.e.: No travel) and an AKC trial in Milwaukee (Hounds for the Holidays). Apparently the H4TH trial is HUGE (three rings) and honestly I'm kind of excited about the idea of having actual competition... There's a good chance, with two AKC trials before then, that Secret would be running Masters by then, too, so we'd get a chance to start working towards her MACH at last. Yeah.... I'm leaning that way.

But then I was (perhaps foolishly) thinking that MAYBE Kizzy would be ready to do a few runs at the NADAC trial in December. Maybe we can split it up and do both. We'll see!