"But he can do it at home!"

Ah, the famous words that every agility instructor rolls their eyes at.  I never thought I would be the one to cause the involuntary eye rolling to occur.  Not because my dogs never make mistakes but because of COURSE I'm smart enough to not make excuses for my lack of training.  Yet last night when Rampage wouldn't weave I found myself saying to anyone that would make eye contact with me, "But he can do it at home!"

Last night we dropped in to our first ever 'big dog' class with dogs that actually know agility and stuff.  Aside from the weaving, he actually did really well.  And really, it was a place he'd never been before, they were 24" weaves (he's only ever seen 20" weaves), and it was dark out with bright scary lights shining on the weaves.  And I'm SURE there were monsters hiding in them too.  Yep, there I go making excuses again :).

He was really cute though.  He held all of his start line stays, did front crosses, rear crosses, serps, wraps and even a push to the backside of a jump! (yes, on purpose).  He had the tightest turn out of tunnel that Jim had seen on that course (and then he missed the entire straight line of jumps out, but that's a different story.)  In the middle of a course he even managed to pick up a cone and place right in the center of a curved tunnel.  He definitely didn't stop and pick it up with his mouth so to be honest I'm really not sure how he got the cone in there.  But *I* had to crawl into the tunnel to get the cone out.  Rampage just wanted to humiliate me.

Poor Icon didn't understand why he was stuck in the car while the puppy was out playing at HIS agility field.  Amazingly he didn't bark like a maniac the entire time (mostly likely because I knew both he and Rampage would so I parked as far away from the field as possible) but he did HOWL mournfully.  Heartbreaking.


Next week we will hopefully start Rammy's 'young dog' agility class which is full of fun dogs and people.  I can't wait!  But until then, maybe we'll have a few weaving field trips :)