One or two days every week since Savannah's arrival, I let her see the rest of the house. Her usual domain is the kitchen, breakfast room, and the TV room. On the days when she goes exploring, I open the French doors between the breakfast room and the dining room, the pocket door between the kitchen and the foyer and living room, and the swinging door that leads from the kitchen to the dining room. I make sure that Sweet Pea is in the TV room with the door closed because cats are definitely not allowed in the front rooms or on the second and third floors of this house. Such rules have been in effect since we moved here, being that the house stays cleaner without cats running all over everything, and I just don't have time to go searching through the rooms when I need to know where Sweet Pea is hiding.
When I open up all those doors for Savannah, I don't call attention to the fact that she can get into the other rooms, I just wait till she finds that out for herself and then I follow her quietly and just watch her. The first week, she barely went across the threshold into the dining room, and she wouldn't go much farther in the foyer than the bottom step of the main staircase. We also have a staircase going from the kitchen to the second floor and Savannah has never shown any interest in those steps at all.
This week, however, after Wednesday afternoon's tea party, Savannah walked with confidence into the foyer, then into and around the living room, then around the dining room table, and she walked through the French doors into the breakfast room. She seemed pleased with herself that she navigated the rooms on her own, and didn't seem to care that I was about three feet behind her all the way.
Savannah was so proud of her adventure that she walked from the breakfast room into the kitchen, then into the foyer, and began her exploration of the front rooms all over again, but this time with an eye for details. She inspected all the porcelain pumpkins and the happy witches and every single black cat decoration that's in those rooms for our Halloween party coming up at the end of this month. She particularly was enamored by a Victorian lady statue that looks quite real and stands in a corner of the living room. Because of Halloween, this statue is dressed up in a black and purple witch's hat, a bright red shawl, and she has a huge purple spider on her shoulder. I don't know if it was the face of the statue or the size of the spider that attracted Savannah, but she just stood there staring at 'the lady' without moving a muscle until her tail started to wag a little bit. I guess she approved of the whimsical costume.
All around those rooms she went, at least six times that evening, just looking at and sniffing everything in her path, with stops in the foyer to look out over the property through the glass panes of the front door. I have to admit that I was definitely proud of her that night... just her ability to look around the rooms without so much as nudging any of the decorative items with her nose, which is her usual method with items she's interested in... that alone was worth all then little puppy trials and tribulations that we've been through with her since September 12th.
It is times such as these when I wish my husband could see this puppy, and realize just how far Savannah has come since we adopted her. Granted, she is still very timid in certain unfamiliar situations, as in the other morning on trash day when the new neighbors put out a huge black trash can near their mailbox. Savannah took one look at that huge can and turned herself around and wanted to walk back down the hill. I was determined to not let her fear of that trash can ruin our walk, so I pulled her around and made her walk past that can and up the hill and once she got past it she was just fine. On the way back down the hill, she barely gave that trash can a sideways glance. Puppy success comes in small steps at times.
My friend Cindy had suggested that maybe Savannah was afraid of noise because this house is usually very quiet and she's just not used to noises. So I started to make unnecessary noise, like closing a cabinet door with more force than necessary, or dropping the lid of a pot on the kitchen counter, and even slamming the back door instead of just closing it. As a result, Savannah is not running to her 'safe corner' in the breakfast room when she hears something unfamiliar now. She will look towards the direction of the noise, but then quickly goes back to what she was doing, which is usually playing with her ever-growing collection of toys.
As I type this now, Savannah is dragging her dog bed from the breakfast room into the TV room. It's a large bed that will fit her when she's full grown, and because of its plushness, it's quite heavy. But she is determined to get that bed from one room to the other and I'm just watching the procedure without letting her know that I've even noticed what's going on.
This afternoon, I gave Savannah a new pillow that I bought in the thrift store, to replace the cat-shaped pillow whose fabric wasn't strong enough for puppy teething. She missed having that other pillow, and she started pulling pillows from the sofa and the chairs of the TV room. Clearly, she wanted her own pillow again, to go with her child-sized blanket... both of which she will carry from room to room all day long, playing with each of them and resting either her toys or her head on both pillow and blanket from time to time during the day. The new pillow I found for Savannah happened to be a very soft leopard-pattern pillow, somewhat similar in color and design to the pillow she was pulling from my chair in the TV room. I'm hoping that Savannah quickly learns to distinguish between my leopard pillow and her leopard pillow.
Every day has been a surprise with this puppy, and there are still moments when I have to remind myself that she is "just a puppy" because she acts like such an old soul sometimes. Except. of course, when she jumps over the sofa in the TV room just to see what's on the other side. Puppy success also comes in big steps at times.
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