Well, we survived the first trial of the season and the first trial since our summer hiatus! LOTS of things to talk about. First, I'd like to say that my boys were great! We had the awesome hospitality of my Aunt Mary Anne and her husband Charlie. They tolerated 3 dogs, a flying squirrel (a baby I am rehabbing), and my boyfriend and myself! A few family members came out on Sunday to watch us run and the agility gods blessed us with 3 great runs for them to watch! 
Saturday started out a little rough and started to feel like the same old stuff from our previous trials. Started picking up the pace in the afternoon and by the time Monster had his standard run he was wild! The sun was blazing and I'd hosed him off a few times before our run so he was feeling frisky by the time we started. I'd prefer to focus on the positive experiences at the trial so I will mostly share Sunday's runs. I was feeling pretty confident about Gamblers with Shawty but I didn't send him very well to the outside jump. I could tell my energy just wasn't there for some reason. He just looked at me like I was crazy and took the chute and the finish jump while I was still standing by the first jump of the gamble! HA! It was super cute. He followed up the day by getting an Advanced Snooker Q in the rain (his last agility run!) and a PII Standard run that was great before that! I chose to retire Shawty after watching him run in gamblers the day prior. I cried afterwards because I hate seeing him overjump to make it. He will have just as much fun playing other games with me!
Monster was a super star Sunday! He was just getting his footing Saturday so that he could show off his skills on Sunday! He made PI Gamblers look easy with 49 points and a Q! We followed that up with a PI Standard run that had some ups and downs but mostly ups. I realized that we are in desperate need of some aframe training. Then, he decided to earn his PI Snooker title with 51 points and a Q! Finally, we ended the day with a lovely and FAST PI umpers run that also finished his PI Jumpers title! That's incredible! I loved watching the playback of the video and seeing where our foundation training paid off.
I strongly urge any one who reads this and is wanting to start agility with their dog to work on foundation first! It may not seem as fun as the running agility stuff but it creates such a good relationship with your dog and gives you guys skills that are a MUST in agility! That's probably
where I see the biggest differences between Monster and Shawty. It's a great lesson that I learned but if I could have known better, I would have done it differently.
Overall the weekend was a great one and I am looking forward to trialing just one dog again for many reasons. We will be back to LCDA in November. By the way, Kellie Verelli was our judge and she was awesome at designing courses and judging. Her briefings were short and sweet and I look forward to being under her judgement again!
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