Ears and Freestyle

OK, so it it sounds like these two things are totally unrelated? Unfortunately, that's not true at my house lately. Ack, have we been through it lately! Teddy started off with inner ear inflammation, then he got an infection on his outer ear. I thought that the antibiotics that he was on was hurting his stomach, so we stopped those as soon as his ears were better. When he continued to be a picky eater (a sure sign that something is not right with him), we went back to the vet to find out that Teddy's throat was very inflamed. I swear, if it's not one thing, it's another! With all of this going on, we've been trying to finalize our new freestyle routine for our first live competition. Whew!


Last week, Teddy and I attended an adoption event for a local animal shelter. We had promised to do some freestyle and obedience along with some of our other freestyle training buddies. We had a blast, but it was the most difficult evironment in which to perform, even on our best day. We were in a parking lot, with our ring defined by a few orange cones, there were cars driving by, dogs and cats waiting to be adopted, and a modest crowd of people on their lunch breaks standing around sending telepathic messages to my dog for him to come over and say hello. Those telepathic messages are stronger than a little black poodle can take. It's a good thing that everyone was easily impressed with a few tricks because doing our full dance routine was not happening. Teddy's good at schmoozing the crowd.

As I said above, Teddy and I have been hard at work on our new freestyle routine. We've been trying to put all of the pieces together and make sure that it fits with the music and it looks somewhat polished. We're still working on the last part. :) So, below is some video from our practice last Saturday. It's very raw. In fact, we totally scrapped the whole first part of our routine, so this was the first time we were trying out our new choreography. I'm also only half in costume- don't worry, the green shirt is not part of the costume. I'm taking a risk in showing this video because we look so rough. It's hard to see in the video, but the reason we had trouble with the hula hoop is because Teddy has on a light line, so I have to make sure that the line clears the hoop before I can move it, otherwise it would look a lot smoother. Anyway, enough disclaimers, we still have a lot of practicing to do in a short amount of time!