Learning from My Mistakes. What I’m Doing Differently with Riley.

I loved my life with my previous animals. All of them were incredible for different reasons. Kiera was my beloved brilliant partner. Graidy was my sentry dog who probably adored me more than any animal I’ve lived with. Finn was the perfect cat (minus furniture scratching) because he was essentially a dog in a cat’s body. And Wink… Wink was the embodiment of joy and love.

But in starting anew, I’ve had a chance to think about what I would do differently to correct what I consider to be some of my mistakes of the past that made my life harder than it had to be.

Here are three big things I’m doing differently:

1. Start off with one dog and train him to within an inch of his life before adding a second dog. Riley was housetrained after the first week because I only had one dog to keep an eagle eye on. (Previously, I got Kiera and Molly together and added three more dogs from there. Yeah. Whew! What was I thinking?!)
2. Don’t feed scraps from the table. (All of my previous dogs were merciless beggars because I did that.)
3. Find a few dog sitters who are also available to house sit, so when we can’t take the dogs, they can stay happily at home. And Andrew and I can happily go here and there together as needed. (In the past, Andrew and I often took turns going places because we often couldn’t find the help we needed to leave the dogs behind.)

I’m sure there will be more that I’ll add to the list as time goes on. But if I can even just stick to these three, it’ll be a game changer!