20 Months

Basil has been with us 4 months now. He is completely comfortable with us and has been taking many liberties like jumping onto the couch and begging for food. We have had to reel some of that behavior back in. Some of the newer things he learned is telling him the "heat is on" and he will go running to the vent. He's not barking at people from the car anymore. He does slip every once in a while when he's with Keith, but I'll just put him back in check. As Cesar Milan instructed. Anticipate the behavior before it occurs and keep on it. His new thing is barking at people who approach the front door, so I'm working on that now.

We introduced carrots, salmon and mackerel. He doesn't seem to like the raw food we got him. He gobbled it up and threw up. I left it frozen and cut the food into cubes. He ate it more slowly this time but he still didn't enjoy it.

He has acclimated to the snow and cold weather. He doesn't love the snow the way his neighbor dog friends like the snow, but he'll at least go in it now. During our blizzard, he jumped across some snow that wasn't shoveled and "fell in". He was startled by that so he's hesistant to go out into the snow unless we shovel the side walk. After a while, I got tired of shoveling, but he still needed to go out of course. The solution? I would put a big foot print into the snow in order to show him the depth of the snow. He would walk into my foot print and then go potty.

I found him sitting on our bed one day just staring out the window. There aren't many places where he can comfortably look out the window and we want him to be able to do that. So I pushed an ottoman up to a window for him. Also, he sits in a cushy rocking chair while Keith works from home. That's *his* spot. He will stare out the window from the chair too, but most of the time he sleeps.