Right, so I should probably explain the dog’s name since most people don’t recognize it. 🙂 Cafall was King Arthur’s dog in the Arthurian legends. It has a bit of a Welsh flair to it, so it’s pronounced more like “kuh-VAHL”. Ok, so Arthur’s dog was a bit… well… bigger. And… er… wolfier? But, darn it, I like the name! And on the AKC registration (which we’re planning to do mainly so we can have him compete in obedience trials and such) he’ll probably have the middle name Emrys which was part of Merlin’s name in the legends and means “immortal”. I’ve been told we’ll probably need a middle name because two dogs of the same name can’t be registered; if the name is already taken, the powers that be add a number to the end of your dog’s name just to make it different. A middle name seems nicer than a number.
The kids love the pup. Eli gets scared when Cafall tries to herd him, though. Cafall plays by running around us and nipping at our feet, not that he has any particular place in mind for us to go. Anyway, Eli doesn’t much care for that, so we’ve had to separate them from time to time. The others don’t seem to mind it as much, though Branwen sometimes gets tired of it and decides to play elsewhere for a while. And so much for Charis being afraid; whenever she sees Cafall, she says, “I want to hold the puppy!”
The hardest part is refusing to let him out whenever they want to play with him. The whole crate training thing requires us to leave him in the crate a good bit of the time for now until he gets the whole outdoor potty idea. He’s improving, but he still has a little way to go. It’s hard to leave him in the crate, though; he doesn’t really mind it terribly much (he’s still young enough that he sleeps a good bit anyway), but he’s so cute and fluffy that you just want to hold him and play with him! And it’s incredibly fun to get him all excited in the kitchen and watch him run so fast that his feet can’t keep up with his body – fwoosh! There goes the puppy!
As much of a pain as this initial housebreaking is, I’m really looking forward to doing the other types of training. Obedience training – and maybe agility training at some point – will be so much more fun than dealing with poopy crates and pee on the floor. We just need to get past the irritating training so we can start on the fun stuff.