General Information: Brinkley

Once again, I am pretending you care.

1. Age -  Five months.

2. Origin of name - "Brinkley is my dog.  He loves the streets of New York as much as I do.  Although he likes to eat bits of pizza and begal off the sidewalk and I prefer to buy them.  Brinkley is a great catcher who was offered a tryout on the Mets farm team but he chose to stay with me so he could spend 18 hours a day sleeping on a large green pillow the size of an inner tube." - Joe Fox

I love You've Got Mail.  It's my favorite movie of all time.  I decided that I would name Brinkley (a Goldendoodle - Golden Retriever mixed with Standard Poodle) after the dog from the movie.  I realize that the Brinkley in You've Got Mail was male and full-blood Golden Retriever, but I work with what I've got. 

I bought Brinkley "a large, green pillow the size of an inner tube."

3. Moving around the house - We marked the doors in and out of the house with mats.  (Her food and water is also marked with a mat to let her know when she is close to it; the puppy likes to accidentally step in her bowls.) Brinkley knows she is close to an exit because there is a texture change.  We also put bells on the sliding glass door - we ring the bells when we open and close the door and hopefully, eventually, Brinkley will learn to bump the bells to let us know she needs to go out.

Since she is blind, when Brinkley first enters a room, she bonks her head on a lot of things.  She finds the wall, stays right up against it and walks the perimeter of the room several times until she gets the general layout of the room.  Then she branches out and learns the rest of the room.  She bumps into things quite often, but not hard enough to hurt her. 

If she gets lost/stuck somewhere - meaning she can't figure out the way out of the room (the master bedroom/bathroom is the worst) - she barks a couple of times until I find her and guide her out.  We are trying not to pick her up when she needs rescuing because we want her to learn to rescue herself.

She loves the backyard because it is completely open and she can run around like crazy without bumping into anything.  The only problem with being in the backyard is that she gets pokey, ouchie, stickers stuck in her fur.  These stickers don't like to come out. In an effort to stop things getting stuck in her fur, we had her groomed so her fur isn't quite so long, but I think that we are going to have to go shorter.

4. Training -We are trying to teach her to better follow the sound of a voice.  Sometimes I think she is partly deaf because it takes her a lot of wandering before she finds us.  We say her name a couple of times and pat our leg in a steady pattern and when she is pointing toward us we say, "Straight, straight: until she walks to us.  Who knows, maybe with all our direction giving, (Ex. Turn around.  Wall. Chair. etc.) she'll be a dog that knows her left from her right.

I have also started taking her to dog training classes.  I will be bragging about how smart she is and all she has learned as soon as we complete the six week course. (Which might take a while, considering I am supposed to be having a baby right in the middle of it.)