Day 13: I'm glad the morning wasn't an indicator of how the rest of the day would go...

Well, this morning started off pretty badly. We were practicing fetch and I accidentally dropped my phone on the tile floor. The top corner cracked a little bit but the glass was all contained under the screen protector. Troy thought that this meant he should fetch it since everything else I had dropped in the last 5 minutes, I told him to fetch. Without me telling him to, he picked it up which cracked the screen even more (if it wasn't already cracked he wouldn't have damaged it but since the screen was already broken, it was much more fragile). By the time I got it from his mouth, there were a few fairly large cracks from the top of the screen all the way to the bottom. So now on my day off tomorrow, I'll be spending the afternoon at the mall trying to figure out what to replace my phone with. I'm debating between switching carriers or just getting the same phone with the same carrier. We'll see...

Other than cracking my phone, we had an awesome day together. We practiced fetching small items such as a credit card, pill bottle, metal washer, and more. We also practiced some more "help" but this time we switched up the scenario. I was laying on my bed in my room and pretended to be in pain. Troy did much better than I anticipated. He barked for about 20 seconds straight really loudly and he started barking almost instantly after I said "help". Usually he gets a little distracted when I say "help" and it takes him a few seconds to clue in that he's supposed to bark.

After lunch we took a 2 hour walk around downtown Oakville. Troy did great and even walked across the sidewalk grates with very little hesitation. A few days ago he would completely jump out of the way and choke himself just so he didn't have to walk on the grates. I'm so proud of how far he has come!

We walked past many different dogs, kids, and people. It was fairly busy as it was nice outside today and Christmas is coming soon. All of the stores were busy so we didn't go in any. We spent most of our time focusing on distractions and getting across the sidewalk grates. At one point there were a few horses that were walking along the street and Troy hardly even noticed!

The only difficulty we had on our walk today was the snow. He was so excited to walk through the snow but after a minute or two he realized that it wasn't play time and stopped pulling as hard on the leash.

After our walk it was time for dinner and then at 6:30 we had a short playtime by ourselves. He is much more interested in playing with toys now than he was for the first few days which is great to see. He played with a squeaky ball for about 10 minutes and then he was tired so we went back to the room. When we got back I gave him a chewy to entertain himself with for a couple of minutes and ever since then he's just been fast asleep while I watched a few TV shows and researched what phone I want to buy tomorrow.

Hopefully Troy does well tomorrow while I'm gone for a few hours. My boyfriend, his sister, and his friend are all coming to visit and meet Troy so tomorrow will be an exciting day for us. I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend.

P.S. It's hard to believe that at this time next week, Troy and I will have already been at home for over 24 hours!

Troy has some of the funniest sleeping positions. Not sure how his paw can be comfortable like that (it looks like his arm is broken; I assure you that it's not) but he stayed in this position for a really long time so I guess he didn't mind :)